Baiju Parthan’s enchanting art journey

A solo exhibition of of recent Works by Baiju Parthan takes place at Kocchi-based Gallery OED. For this unconventional artist, reality is what you tend to make of it, and it’s up to you to extract the kind of meaning from it, based on your perceptual framework’s peculiarities. ‘You look at the world on basis of who and what you are!’ He looks to generate fresh metaphors and symbols that have the potential to expand the range of meanings that we can wrestle out of life and reality. Here are key aspects related to his journey and the thought processs behind it:

• Born in Kerala in 1956, Baiju Parthan studied Painting at Goa College of Art from 1978-83 and has received a Master's degree in Philosophy from The Mumbai University. He has featured in several major group and solo exhibitions in India and worldwide, comprising Galerie Christian Hosp, Austria; Anant Gallery, Delhi; Aicon Gallery, NY; and the Ninth Asian Bienniale, Dhaka in 1999. He essentially works with 3D graphics that are linked with aspects of animation and virtual reality. He has grasped programming with a scripted language in 3D procedural animation, Python.
• The direction of his art took another twist after the artist got hooked to philosophy - the understanding of the self as perceived in the western and eastern ways of thinking. How you create art is defined by the way the self is organized. His quest to create is more to do with knowledge.
• “Every new bit of knowledge is never undone, he believes, and tries and transforms himself through learning…as how far one can extend oneself into one’s own self, and also one’s family, the society, the nation. Having lived in an inflated personal bubble, engrossed in his own worldly pursuits, he decided at some point that maybe he was not being fair to the rest of his life.”
• The artist worked with traditional media as in painting on canvas as well as new media which range from interactive programming based art as well as large scale prints on metallic surfaces. Both these areas pose their own challenges and also expand the scope of what he can say.