Important Notice

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 the present lot, a diptych titled Progression (Last supper - after Da Vinci), Parthan offers his version of Leonardo da Vinci's fifteenth century, 29 foot mural that covers the back wall of the refectory at the Santa Maria delle Grazie convent in Milan. This representation, however, has been drained of the vivid colours of the original. Instead, the artist has rendered its subjects in monotones of shadowy black and blue. Parthan has also altered the perspective of the original in his adaptation, flattening the foreground against a detail-shorn background, and eliminating the sense of depth and separation in the work.

Under the silhouette of the long table, a series of numbers in blood red offers the viewer a first clue about Parthan's intent in this piece. Running from 1 to 1587, these are the first seventeen numbers of the Fibonacci sequence, albeit with the last number slightly incorrect, halting the progression. Each Fibonacci number is equal to the sum of the two that precede it, and the ratio between each set of consecutive Fibonacci numbers, Phi, has been used by artists and architects for several centuries as a ‘golden proportion', or an arrangement of objects in rectangular, triangular or spiral forms based on this proportion that are ‘most pleasing to the human eye'. Da Vinci is known for his use of this theory, and ‘golden rectangles' feature in the construction of almost all of his works, including the Last Supper. In this work, however, although Parthan points out the ingenuity of this simple mathematical relationship and the age-old correlation between art, science, and nature, he also highlights the value of uncertainty and deviation from its classic progression.

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