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RAJENDRA ANANDRAO PATIL

PARA

The material dimension of daily life and its potential to be transmuted into aesthetic practice has been an integral part of Rajendra Patil's (Para) artistic vision and repertoire. Patil's formative encounter with the working-class Chawls of Bombay (Mumbai) along with the rural and agrarian landscapes of his childhood in Chopda has had a distinctive influence on his sensibility. His canvases and installations expand over a period of almost three decades. His oeuvre comprises such diverse mediums as oil, acrylic, metal casting, terracotta, mirror glass installation, and digital interface, represented through the language of abstraction, concrete concerns that are grounded in lived reality.

Patil's art over the years reflects the complex, heterogeneous texture of post-industrial urban geographies. It revels in the pleasures and travails of the laboring body encoded in the physicality of tools. It participates in the preservation of ephemeral historical and personal memory through the tangible and quotidian archive of objects. Tools are an important presence in Patil's paintings and sculptures. They occupy the canvas and the Spatio-temporal coordinates of the environment in diverse ways and providing an archaeological optic with which to interrogate certain primordial and fundamental questions about the nature of human existence. The tool, be it farm equipment, mechanical instruments, or artisans implements, serves as a threshold for mankind's emergence as a cultural being capable of augmenting his powers and turning nature into a resource for knowledge cultivation, and consumption.