‘Apposite | Opposite’ courtesy Chemould and Chatterjee & Lal

A highly celebrated name globally from the new generation of artists is that of Rashid Rana. In his work, aspects like visual urban culture, contemporary art, art history, and a few mundane things are culled together to build an alternate reality, which unravels both formal and conceptual concerns, invariably joined in seamless schema.

They explore flatness of the peculiar pictorial plane alongside ideas of three-dimensionality through static visuals as well as time-based, dynamic works. Concepts like originality, authenticity, and ethnicity are extrapolated, exposed and at times even exploded, through these artworks that even depend upon the prevailing language of our times, existing like videos of our dreams and photographs of our imagination. 

Further elaborating on his core concerns on eve of his new series, entitled ‘Apposite | Opposite’, concurrently being exhibited at Chatterjee & Lal courtesy Mumbai-based Gallery Chemould, critic Quddus Mirza states, “There are many worlds in our one planet. The political, the religious, the economic, and the social: all these spheres seem to collide, contradict, conflict, converge and combine with each other. It’s a process, which can be traced from ancient history right to the globalized present.

“In his work these worlds come closer to forming another parallel entity - both rooted and yet existing independently from the artist’s immediate surroundings. This might well be understood in terms of the physical, the psychological or the virtual. Multiple visuals, which are deftly drawn from diverse sources in mystical mosaic-like settings, offer complex views that if decoded, deeply relate to our scattered, shattered world.”

Unique to the artist’s practice are deft digital prints that weave thousands of tiny portraits and other intriguing images, conglomerating them as pixels within a single unified image, vacillating between the micro and the macro. He manipulates or miniaturized photos from advertisements into digitized re-creations to result in a visual synthesis show his fascination with the history of a ubiqutious photographic ‘moment’.