The Good earth – Exhibition

The Good earth on Zigguart – Rajendra Anandrao Patil better known as Para is a contemporary Indian artist born in Chopda Maharashtra on 1st of January in 1966. The material dimension of daily life and its potential to be transmuted into aesthetic practice has been an integral part of Rajendra Patil’s artistic vision and repertoire(Read more about this artist).

These paintings remind you of landscapes. Yet they are not landscapes. They remind you of the objects that you have seen once but forgotten about their existence. Yet they are not live representations of those objects. These paintings made out of color field take you to those minds – scapes that you feel residing inside you. Yet they are not the meta scopes manifest in your thoughts. Simultaneously they represent all that one knows and negate the same with the same verve.

The Good earth of Rajendra Patil unsettles the idea of viewing, a comfortable notion of viewing art. They appear before you as abstract paintings but they give you the suggestions of figures embedded in there. The more one tries to decipher the material nature of figures the more one gets for away from the material world. Patil plays with this idea of ambiguity. the notion of firmness and fickleness. Seen a larger perspective his works come out of the philosophical awareness that negates the things-ness of things and the singular meaning-making. There is a constant interweaving of the concrete and the abstract in the paintings that helps the viewer to enter and exit these paintings with a renewed vigour search. They pleasure the viewer on the one hand and the other. They transport them to new planes of thought about life and the materialistic surroundings from there to the higher planes of philosophical thinking.

Hailing from the school of abstraction, Patil’s works have been primarily inspired by his constant journeys and the visual that he imbibes during these trips. An artist who does not click pictures for further reference to create his paintings, Patil makes use of his eyes and mind to extract the essence of what he has seen while on a trip. They reappear before him, while he is in this studio and this canvas as fields of vision. Patil makes innumerable drawings in black and white as if they were the effort to capture these visions and feelings. But when it comes to paintings he does not try to copy these drawings into paintings. Paintings are autonomous bodies for him. They vibrate with the different life captures the visions at a different pace and different color schemes.

Considering the meters like Rothko Kandinsky and Klee in mind, and keeping the artistic nations propounded by Prabhakar Kolte and Prabhakar Barwe as his guiding principles, Patil creates his paintings as an effort to understand and recreate the essence of life and its vision.

The vast field that he points to both in monochrome and colors, becomes a sort of fluid base for the object-like images to float in. These works could be called texts that deconstruct their own textual their painterly manifestations. They do not fix the meanings within themselves; instead, they let the viewer read into paintings to eke out their own meanings. According to the artist, abstraction is the core of visual thinking and his whole efforts to get into the essence of both material and non-material aspects of life.
JohnyML Delhi, Feb. 2013 SONY F4 F7 S / LCHE PS F9 +19 F1