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.

Here, the artist uses the issue of genetically modified or 'engineered' food to approach and interrogate the complex intersections between technology and evolution, reality and myth. In this canvas, which contrasts the image of a bar-coded pear with those of an early primate and the artist's own face in the background, "The affirmation of wonder at technocratic miracles is woven with an ironic critique of consumerist society and its knowledge monopolists, who would even patent nature and subject the quest for the Divine to the laws of the market. The conventional binary of reality and magic collapses: the laws of Newtonian mechanics, the emancipatory rule-bending of sorcery, the patterns of myth, and the deceptive, mercurial realities of contemporary technology intersect here, to produce a world governed by paradox and instability" (Ranjit Hoskote, "Amalgam of text and image", The Hindu, December 15, 2002).

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