Orchha Jehangir Mahal mirror merger Print

'Clashio Barbarani' is a sort of composite of elements of my given name and my (other) artist's name – I also have works on this site as 'Prem Shashi'. But mainly it reflects my unashamed love of brilliant colour and maximalist complexity, a taste that seems almost 'barbarian' in the context of the lasting fashionable flirtation with cool, neutral or dull colours and minimalism's 'terrible simplification' of form and composition. These photographic works took shape when I began travelling extensively in India and South and Southeast Asia, taking pictures of the fabulous old temples, forts, palaces, gardens and bazaars I revelled in on a relatively inexpensive compact digital camera. These sometimes otherworldly architectural realms evoked for me a vision of a glorious fairy-tale age of splendour and a more contemplative, aesthetic way of life. Wanting to conjure up yet more fantastical visions than the places themselves afforded me, I began to play around with the colour and exposure dials in the old Apple iPhoto app and in Photoshop, sometimes also adding in mirroring or/and layering or collaging effects. The resulting works often evoked my feeling of being in these magical places more strongly than the original natural photographs. I particularly enjoyed the painterly effects and the dazzling colour combinations that emerged seemingly randomly when I moved the colour and exposure settings around. For several years, I delighted in working through hundreds of my photographs, experimenting with them in this way, and building up an extensive gallery of fantastical architectural visions, often in brilliant psychedelic shades. I then began to work the same magic on my photos of some of the more fantastical buildings from Europe's architectural heritage, leading to a series of works with a slightly different though clearly related flavour. Unfortunately, for the most recent of these, I was reduced to working with a relatively low-grade mobile phone camera, so the depth and detail of what could be achieved is a little lowered, but still, some of the effects are intriguing. The works uploaded here are a selection of these photographic dreams, often reflecting an unashamedly maximalist aesthetic, as well as a few other works where I played explicitly with extreme maximalism to create almost impossibly complex layered works.