Saturday, August 18, 2012

Deciphering Sumedh Rajendran artistic realm

Sumedh Rajendran’s works  tend to exude a fluid,  sensuous yet a rather jarring version of reality quite at odds with itself –isolated and multifarious- playing on space, open yet well within the confines of form, with the absence of an obvious grounding element, instead indicated by the malleability and fluidityof the materials used. In his sculptures and collages , form creates - even as it morphs with the inorganic - a fluidity that is indeed powerful though precarious. Sculptures fabricated within collages or mounted on the wall attest to the fragility of form in space.

The gaps between each material, whether of white background space – usually a wall - or in the case of free standing sculptures, are the breathing nodes of his works. It is through these nodes that his works speak of the incongruence of the objects he assembles, as well as the weight of the material they are fabricated in. His figures are weighted forward and backward to others. They are melded together to sometimes lean on each other. All this occurs without a firm back grounding, and this particular mode activates the space around these figures.

It activates a longing for support, alongside the subtle fear of falling over, but more importantly it activates in return the figures and objects. In this particular work, Sumedh Rajendran activates the space by creating a distant horizon, a looming set of mountains across whose plane the figure of the man and dog, conjoined together are placed at center. The figures are linked to the mountains in the distance by a winding thin line of road.

In one of his essays, Ranjit Hoskote has stated, “The objects assembled together to form ‘Final Call’ , although they are developed around the friction between incongruous entities fused together, are deliberately engineered: they are signs of the complex and interdependent life that this planet leads, where every participant in the existential process likely imperil every other.”

It’s the absurdity and the incongruence of the objects used and the material that catches our imagination. Rather than illustrating a specific idea, its function is to startle us with the authenticity of the actions inherent in the associations between material, object and space, and the depth of the artistic images formed.

(Courtesy: An essay by Renuka Sawhney to ‘A Floating Object - The Guild Collection – Series I – 2012’ at The Guild, Mumbai)

No comments:

Post a Comment