Renaissance Art Gallery will host a photorealistic painting exhibition by Kishor Raja from March 13 to 17. Kishor Raja, born in 1976 in Kottayam, Kerala is a realistic painter.
He has been fascinated by the beauty of the landscape since his childhood and has been capturing landscape on a small piece of paper. Since his school days, he has been interested in drawing nature in his own style. He practised painting in acrylic and oil in his postmetric time. He is a great lover of nature and wishes to recreate them in his own style which directly interacts with the viewer without any translator.
This exhibition of paintings is a willful effort to explore the beauty of Kerala (God’s own Country) on canvas in a different style — photo realism and hyper realism, that are not so familiar to Indian paintings. In his paintings, he tries to recreate the beauty of nature with minute details. So, the paintings look like a photograph instead. In this exhibition, the paintings showcased include oil on canvas. His collection includes beautiful rivers, dams, temples, seascapes, greenery on the hillside, birds, animals, sunset and heritage sites.
The main motivation of this series of paintings is to preserve the beauty of nature and heritage, which may be destroyed or vanished (due to urbanisation, natural calamity, growing population, etc) into the canvas for our next generation.
This is why he uses oil as a medium which has proved its durability for decades.
For this collection, he has travelled extensively and visited many places.
Photo realism is the art of gathering information from photographs and then using this information to create a painting that appears photographic.
The term is primarily applied to paintings from the United States art movement that began in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Several European artists assosiated with photo realism that have emerged since the mid-1990s.
In nineteenth and twentieth century — after the invention of Photography art movements, it has been well documented that artists used the photograph as the source and the genre of painting was explored based on using the camera.
Thus, the culmination of the invention of the photograph was a breakthrough in art’s history.
Photo realists use a photograph or several photographs to gather the information to create their paintings and it can be argued that the use of a camera and photographs is an acceptance of Modernism. The photorealistic painter must be a good photographer and must have the technical ability to make the finished work appear photographic.
Hyper realism is a genre of painting resembling a high-resolution photograph.
Hyper realism is a fully fledged school of art and can be considered as an advancement of photo realism by the methods used to create the resulting paintings or sculptures. The term is primarily applied to an independent art movement and art style.