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Lot 20

Baiju Parthan “operates deftly with the vocabulary of mass culture, making sophisticated play with its seductive images and capsule wisdom…[His] ensembles draw on a variety of source images including newspaper and magazine photographs, satellite maps, billboard images and reproductions of canonical works from the history of art. In recent years, he has deployed the protagonist of the Tarot, the avatars of Vishnu, the entomologist’s album and the... Baiju Parthan “operates deftly with the vocabulary of mass culture, making sophisticated play with its seductive images and capsule wisdom…[His] ensembles draw on a variety of source images including newspaper and magazine photographs, satellite maps, billboard images and reproductions of canonical works from the history of art. In recent years, he has deployed the protagonist of the Tarot, the avatars of Vishnu, the entomologist’s album and the symbology of the medieval Catholic saints….In this way, Parthan contests both the homogenising structures of globalisation and the parochial forces of majoritarianism, subverting their formulaic, slogan-driven visual languages to his own idiosyncratic purposes” (Ranjit Hoskote, Baiju Parthan: A User’s Manual, After Image Publishing, Mumbai, 2006, p. 49, 52, 53).

In this piece, Parthan pits two boxers against each other in the midst of the hieroglyphic and entomological icons that border the canvas. While one contestant is haloed, the other is not, perhaps representative of the eternal battle raging between the forces of virtue and vice, rephrased in a contemporary idiom. However, as the title suggests, the artist seems to have uncovered, through an ethnographic study, that this eternal encounter is no more than a façade – a ticketed match to entertain the masses. Like every other element of our present realities, it is a construction, a part of the matrix of data in which we function.

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