seekrajan

seekrajan

CK Rajan: A Selected Retrospective

Curated by Grant Watson

January 12 – March 9, 2023

“seekrajan |CK Rajan: A Selected Retrospective” presents a survey of the artist CK Rajan, dating from the late 1980s to the present. It assembles a comprehensive range of work, as well as archival material which has never been exhibited together before.

As a student at the Faculty of Fine Arts, MS University, Baroda in the late 1980s, Rajan was a member of the Kerala Radical Group, a collective of painters and sculptors who sought to politicise the Indian art world. After the group had dispersed, Rajan moved to Hyderabad in 1990 where he lived until recently returning to his native Kerala. His output since the 1980s has mostly included small-scale sequential bodies of work that can be organised into distinct phases, each of which is represented in this exhibition.

Paintings made on the inside of cigarette packets between 1989 and 1990, collectively titled

In Search of Utopia, suggest pocket-sized Constructivist utopias, defined by architectonic and geometric shapes painted in monochrome. Here, miniature cityscapes, stadiums, stage sets, and astronomical observatories are empty apart from singular matchstick figures. Survivors (1991), a series of still lives using Indian ink on paper, depict arrangements of objects from the artist’s studio. Elements such as a knife, pliers, and a brick hint at menace, but any allegorical interpretation associated with still life as a genre remains opaque.

The Mild Terrors collages—produced between 1992 and 1996—use cuttings from papers and magazines to create small jewel-like compositions. Surreal in their distortion of scale and juxtaposition of images, they register the impact of economic liberalisation through the culture of popular print media. Besides being directly represented, violence appears in the dislocations and estrangements that can be seen in both urban and rural contexts, the clash between poverty and wealth, and the array of products aimed at a burgeoning middle class out of kilter with traditional ways of life. Here, women appear as a central motif but are rescaled to become giants who intersect with architecture and seem bestowed with superhuman agency.

Small paintings on unstitched canvas produced in 2013 depict abstract landscapes that cohere around a few cryptic interventions, such as a dab or brushstroke of paint that bring whole narratives into play. These fragmentary elements give the viewer clues to a storyline, some referencing art history in ways which are ironic or counterintuitive, others creating political subtexts that break out through words freighted with meaning. The human presence is swallowed by the landscape and the sky, to be experienced as a pinprick of consciousness.

Over the years, Rajan has produced several bodies of sculpture. The Table Top Sculptures from the early 1990s are modular primary-coloured MDF structures resembling toy houses, in which objects such as a clock, a knife and a toy car are encased. Psychic Objects (2010) play with scale and the distortion of the everyday, and have class associations relating to subsistence agriculture, construction work and domestic labour. But with the power to shapeshift, they suggest a subversion of the social order, or perhaps offer the rudimentary tools for an insurrection. More recently in 2017 the artist produced a series, loosely moulded in clay, titled Small Sculptures. Cast in bronze, then painted, these sculptures are presented for the first time in this exhibition.