HYDERABAD: The upcoming exhibition ‘Desire – Us’: An Interlude’ by noted artist A Rajeswara Rao at Kalakriti Art Gallery offers a convergence of modern techniques and traditional craft. The result, as comes out of such amalgamations, is a narration of our times which puzzles you and at the same time makes you raise questions about the entire perception that pertains to the socio-cultural factors fast changing around us. The artist delivers the message through his choice of one particular human being present in several of his works.
The colour palette that the artist has used is the colour of the earth itself as if it were picked from canvas of autumn: ochre, russet, rust, bronze and sand. The artist began a project with a textile designer friend which made him work on the series which is a sort of interval about his affair with paper-cuts and patchitras. The exhibition curator B Padma Reddy writes: “He draws inspiration from the age old craft of paper cutting and traditional ‘Talapatrachitras’ of Odisha, reinterpreting the medium to suit his imagery by converting the simple act of cutting, to create the conventional positive and negative, into complex cervixes to define elements and appropriating them into a visual panorama of narratives to the contemporary viewer.
Very little separates Rao from his identities as a practitioner of his craft and his role as a quintessential explorer of elitist musings and irrepressible desires in a mundane routine.”One sees the figure of a woman in shades holding a bottle of fizzy drink or a cigarette with a weird expression on her face. Her dresses change from body-hugging attire to huge Victorian ball gowns.
The contours of her face look ragged with a suggestion that can come from experiencing absolute dystopia all around. One can also notice a paper work depicting a man trying to light up his pipe from a fire pot hung near the cornice of a roof. Interestingly, the artwork is surrounded by paper flowers denoting the fire getting extinguished in the process of life. Overall, Rao’s works is set to get the viewers thinking.
The exhibition begins on December 21 and will be on till January 2