Important Notice

Lot 52

 

Quick Zoom

With an eclectic academic background in engineering, botany, hardware technology, comparative mythology, painting, art history and philosophy, Baiju Parthan’s artistic vocabulary is anything but straightforward. Further complicating his idiom is the fact that the artist has always been fascinated by the subtleties of art making, and the various ways in which a work of art can engage and hold the viewer’s attention. Consequently, Parthan’s works... With an eclectic academic background in engineering, botany, hardware technology, comparative mythology, painting, art history and philosophy, Baiju Parthan’s artistic vocabulary is anything but straightforward. Further complicating his idiom is the fact that the artist has always been fascinated by the subtleties of art making, and the various ways in which a work of art can engage and hold the viewer’s attention. Consequently, Parthan’s works resemble composite puzzles, riddled with references from various religious traditions, mythologies, art histories and political philosophies, and crammed with layers of meaning for the viewer to unpack and digest.

In his Soft Graffiti series of paintings, of which the present lot is part, Parthan overlays photorealistic images with various ASCII characters, superimposing several new layers of meaning on the original. “Under Parthan’s influence, the ASCII character-encoding scheme – that is, the American Standard Code for Information Interchange, originally developed as telegraphic code – transforms into an existential commentary that asks the question, ‘What is the significance of mythic vocabulary, when modern icons are nothing but virtual symbols of themselves?’” (Milljunction: Paintings and Photoworks by Baiju Parthan, Aicon Gallery press release, 2010).

Parthan explains, saying, “I certainly see virtualization and gradual relocation of our everyday activities from the realm of the real into virtual data space as the most important signifier or marker that identifies the present historic moment. The attempt in ASCII code paintings is to capture this particular marker and also re-assert the physicality of the photographic image…With the photograph gradually turning into a virtual entity, the physicality of painting has become more attractive to me as an artist. I feel the physicality of the painted image is becoming an important or the only counterpoint to the fact that the photograph of today (our primary source of images) is a virtual object captured on a digital camera and uploaded onto an online album or to a hard disc where it lives as bits and bytes, till invoked onto a computer screen” (Ibid.).

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