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To the old and the new

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Arati Menon Carroll Mumbai
Baiju Parthan's latest works reflect his fascination for both archaic and post-modern thought.
 
The smile precedes the man. "I left my phone on for you in case you got lost," says Baiju Parthan. At all other times that mobile phone stays off. "Too many gallerists asking for too much in too little time," he mutters through a chuckle.
 
It's no surprise he is being hunted; Parthan hasn't had a solo showing in art (save a multi-media installation) in four years. "I am not concerned with volume, only quality," he explains.
 
Parthan's latest works, a year-and-a-half in the making, are an unlikely pastiche of myth and modern machine. Vast canvases, with ponderous claims to Renaissance masters and modernists alike, side-by-side with computer codes offering metaphorical references to the software age, reflect his fascination for both archaic and post-modern thought.
 
The diversity of imagery is not surprising given Parthan's multi-coloured credentials. Long years of conforming to the Marxist culture of social surveillance that consumed Kerala in the '60s and '70s ("an artist may as well have taken a begging bowl to the street") led him to acquiring a "respectable" degree in botany.
 
He was midway through a second degree in civil engineering when he took up reading texts on art history. "I realised art was not as frivolous as I was made to believe. There was a chronology, a history, even a logic to it."
 
Excited by his discovery, Parthan made a beeline to Goa for a degree in fine art. Hippie Goa sucked him into its vortex of liberal tolerance.
 
"After feeling like a social freak, I suddenly felt completely normal." Parthan got drawn into underground literary movements and was exposed to several alternative world views on art, philosophy and anthropology.
 
In the early '80s, Parthan took a break from painting; his interest in Western art history was waning. "I realised that in the world of art history, the East was just a footnote".
 
So he enrolled in a post-graduate diploma in comparative mythology in Mumbai, and began working as an illustrator. He read up on proto-historic art, balancing that with an exposure to post-modern theory. His mammoth canvases today are an extension of that post-modern credo "" where art is always "spectacular" and occupies the viewer's entire field of vision.
 
Nine of these epic works will be on view at Mumbai's Sakshi gallery starting the 11th of September. Titled Source Code (the raw code that makes up a software application), the exhibition raises philosophical issues about the apparent and hidden implications of the software economy that embodies modern India.
 
The mythical imagery is compelling and the palette continues to be dominated by Parthan's preferred tertiary colours.
 
"Archaeology" will undoubtedly be the cynosure of every eye. A triptych, it is two parts a reference to Michelangelo's "The Fall and Expulsion from Garden of Eden" at the Sistine Chapel and one part hex code of the communist symbol "" the sickle.
 
"We were a socialist country, now morphing into an IT superpower; will it be an Eden that we're finally ejected from?" asks Parthan rhetorically. Each of his diptychs and triptychs presents the hex code as an alter image. "I have painted the hex code that is revealed when each of my portraits is translated through a hex editor, a computer programme commonly used by hackers."
 
"What's special about Baiju," says Sangeeta Chopra of Art Musings Gallery, "is that his vocabulary is all his own. He resembles no one and there's nobody else quite like him."
 
She's particularly excited that Parthan is revisiting philosophical metaphors he expressed some years ago, a throwback to his study of hardware engineering in the mid-'90s.
 
"Source code is particularly significant because I am re-interpreting some of my early works. Almost like recompiling a code to produce a new version of an application," he explains.
 
Chopra indicates the collectors are queued up, and there are only nine works to jostle for. "They've been waiting a long time," she says. "It's not like I am consciously limiting supply or anything, it's just my style of working," shrugs Baiju with that unvarying smile as he walks me out.

 

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First Published: Sep 02 2006 | 12:00 AM IST

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