Daijiworld Media Network – Mangalore (VA)
Mangalore, Jul 1: ‘The Floating World', an exhibition of paintings by Deviprasad Rao, will be inaugurated at Orchid Art Gallery here on Friday July 2.
Gopal B Hosur, inspector general of police- western range will inaugurate the exhibition which will be held at gallery premises in Hemavati building, Balmatta. It will be open for public viewing till July 15 from 10 am to7 pm. There will be 23 paintings and Drawings on display.
Margaret Mascarenhas, Goa is the curator of the exhibition.
About the artist
In a recent essay, abstract artist and art critic Swatee Kotwal characterized Deviprasad C Rao as an “artist of the floating world.” This was not a literal reference to the almost exclusively figurative Japanese tradition of Ukiyo-e in technique and style, but rather to its general sensibility, where each work is a reflection of contemporary life, encapsulated as a suspended moment in time.
What gives Rao's work its visual appeal are the sensual and childlike properties of his line, executed in an intuitive but controlled version of what Breton called “psychic automatism,” modified by the dynamic physicality of techniques derived from his study of Jackson Pollack. The subconsciously inspired imagery of Rao is infused with an unobtrusively Asian sensibility in the positioning of forms. The figures that can be discerned even in his most abstract works are often evocative of tribal art. Compositionally, the works have a zen-like quality.
Sculptor Anish Kapoor said in a recent interview: “What's interesting about the younger generation is that their forum seems to be global and their engagement seems to be with themselves as artists, rather than with a half-understood concept of what it means to be Indian.” Deviprasad C Rao belongs to this an ascendant international breed of Indian artist.
To date Rao has produced a body of work he calls, “Floating World” in four series. Beyond Barcelona, Buddha, Prescience, and, most recently, Cosmic Clusters. Beyond Barcelona is the result of Rao's trip to that city in 2002 and his submergence in the art and architecture of the region. Readily perceived is the stylistic influence the Catalan painters have had on his artistic vision. The product is not actually Barcelona, but the memory and feeling of Barcelona as seen through the eyes of the artist, filtered and translated into his own language. Through the use of light shading contrasted with opaque lines, layering of subtle patterns, and color gradations, he offers his tribute to the city.
Ukiyo-e is sometimes translated as “pictures of the sorrowful world”, an allusion to the pleasure-seeking aspects of daily life as well as the cycles of death and rebirth from which Buddhists seek deliverance. The Buddha series is the expression of Rao's long-time engagement with Eastern spiritualism, especially Tibetan Buddhism. In these works he consciously exhibits more line control, but the resulting sense of ritualism, detachment and transformation is affected through the pathos of shape rather than line.
In the third series, Prescience, a collection of imaginary city and landscapes inspired by aerial views we still see exuberance in the movement of line, but there is also the insinuation of a darker element, the foreshadowing of a world at odds with itself. In his newest series, Cosmic Clusters, reverses his aerial perspective, defragmenting his dense imaginary cityscapes, plucking chunks of them and relocating them in negative space, where they float, free of gravity like miscellaneous pieces of a puzzle in a brightly hued universe, created with a heavy layering of colour application. It is a vision of a broken world.
While Rao's visual lexicon is a constantly evolving hybrid of archetype, popular culture, and prophesy, at the root of his oeuvre lies a discernible ethic: a concern for spirituality and nature, understated, suggesting the possibility of something more substantial.