According to Baiju Parthan, the work of an artist is to extend and make visible “unexpected and imagined potentialities that are not evident within the everyday version of reality” (Generation I, Saffronart and The Guild Gallery, 2004). Extracting his motifs from the mass media, popular culture and religious iconography amongst other sources, the artist combines them on his pictorial surface in ways that diverge from the...
According to Baiju Parthan, the work of an artist is to extend and make visible “unexpected and imagined potentialities that are not evident within the everyday version of reality” (Generation I, Saffronart and The Guild Gallery, 2004). Extracting his motifs from the mass media, popular culture and religious iconography amongst other sources, the artist combines them on his pictorial surface in ways that diverge from the `everyday version of reality`. Putting the cultural fragments he collects together with geometric forms, abstract patterns and random text and numbers, the artist assembles collage-like scenes that approach the idea of `the real` in a novel way: “…for Baiju, reality is less about empirical exactitude and more about the complex web of perceptual mediations that construct for us our experience of the real” (Abhishek Hazra, Vapour, The Guild Gallery, 2005).
In this work, Parthan contemplates the primal life-force that all living things on our planet have in common. Whether, human, animal, bird or plant, the struggle to `live` unites us all. Combining the images of a man and a hawk with those of flowers in this collage, the artist suggests that no matter how different we are from other species, there is a strand of `ethnobotanical memory` that connects each of us to each other as well as to each unit of the other species we share the earth with.