Important Notice

The present lot, a large canvas titled ‘Location’, stands testimony to the varied interests and influences that have shaped Baiju Parthan’s body of work, stemming from his diverse academic background which includes instruction in philosophy, comparative mythology, art history, painting, hardware technology, engineering and botany.

Here, a large Buddha head dominates the canvas which, like many of Parthan’s other works, has the... The present lot, a large canvas titled ‘Location’, stands testimony to the varied interests and influences that have shaped Baiju Parthan’s body of work, stemming from his diverse academic background which includes instruction in philosophy, comparative mythology, art history, painting, hardware technology, engineering and botany.

Here, a large Buddha head dominates the canvas which, like many of Parthan’s other works, has the Fibonacci sequence of numbers stamped across it. In this sequence, each number is equal to the sum of the two that precede it, and the ratio between each set of consecutive Fibonacci numbers, Phi, is referred to as the ‘golden proportion’. Used by artists and architects for several centuries, forms based on this proportion are supposed to be the ‘most pleasing to the human eye’.

Though they may seem disparate, the image painted on this canvas and the numbers inscribed on it are closely related. According to the canons of Asian art history, Buddha’s countenance is considered divine, and each of the details in its representations plays a role in creating perfect visual harmony, including the small spot of hair in between the eyebrows and the ‘ushnisha’ or protrusion on top of the head. Initiating a multifaceted discourse on proportion, technology and divinity, Parthan does not intricately detail the face on this canvas, but renders it as a pixelated Rorschach ink blot, the left side a mirror image of the right. Adding to this symmetry and generating questions about technologically aided artistic production are the four perfectly mirrored binary numbers in each corner.

Speaking about the artist’s complex imagery, Ranjit Hoskote notes, “The elaborate threading together of a narrative follows these preliminaries of ground-laying, for Parthan: he tells his tale, not directly, but elliptically, in laconic images and jump-cut sequences. Its episodes are linked by probability rather than certainty, so that the viewer is at liberty to form his own reading. Once you enter these paintings, you are on your own. You are not obliged to follow a strict pattern of decoding that the artist has laid down. Parthan is a storyteller who celebrates the versionality of telling and the open-endedness of showing” (Baiju Parthan - A User’s Manual, Afterimage Publishing, Mumbai, 2006, p. 22-23).

Read More
Artist Profile
Other works of this artist in: this auction  |  entire site