The Fluid Painting

At a time when many young painters are tempted to adopt one or another of the prevailing house styles of contemporary Indian art, Rahul Vajale pursues a refreshingly idiosyncratic agenda. His imagery is not influenced by the media. His work does not suffer from the semiotic clutter that afflicts any number of young artists, testimony to their misguided attempts at scanning and grabbing the hard-won sophistications of Parthan, Dodiya, Nair, Kallat and Natesan. Nor does Vajale try and win on mere scale, stretching paint and losing detail in the effort to cover the distance from one edge of a vast canvas to the other. And, most fortunately, he remains untouched by that XL enthusiasm for civil-society initiatives of social awareness which, in the absence of true radicalisation, serves numerous young artists as a feeble politics. Instead, Vajale’s charcoal drawings on paper and acrylic paintings on canvas are marked by an attractive crispness of handling and clarity of image. His drawings insist, in their dramatic precision, that we follow the charcoal on its image-making journey around a head, rising up against the whiteness of the paper in jags, flows and curlicues: the line folds itself around the psychic history of a personality, real or imagined, and contours its representation accordingly. His paintings demand full-bodied engagement too. I would like to regard Rahul Vajale’s paintings as releases, in several senses of this mercurial word. First: as acts of letting out, from the germinal circuits of the subconscious mind, as it were in instalments, a critique of the deceptive coherence of selfhood and reality. Second: as publications, in succinct or abbreviated form, of what the artist hopes to present in more substantial measure in the years to come. And third: as spasmodic bursts of energy, affirming a will to articulate, more explicitly, the deep reserves of insight into the inherently unstable and unravelling contemporary self and its productions, which the artist has built up ….. Ranjit Hoskote ( Art Curator ) Place :Pune Email : Cell No. : +91 7208377459