Visceral Landscapes

To describe the work of Rajnish is like trying to hold running water in ones hand. Her work draws the viewer into a space as a sensibility of time, place and the human experience without reference to the particularity of her own life. That she is Indian, that the colours are strong and definite, that some times she tends to give titles like “Housing Society in Gurgaon” to her paintings is bye the bye, -incidental. Rajnish’s work transcends particularity. While she uses her own experience of a market, or memory of a moments emotion to find the visual language that will take us with her into that experience, what we will share is the transcendence of the human condition.

How does one explain the powerful ‘draw’ of Rajnish’s work? The work is not consciously intellectual; its immediate first impact is visceral. Yet in fact it is intensely intellectual. Although we are dealing with brilliant landscapes, architecture, journeys somewhere, this is not plain air painting. They are rather markers of all those things, taking us with her into our shared experience. Conceived after those moments had passed and she was in another physical space. They are memories. She draws them out of her past and we must search for them and ourselves in the work. They draw subconsciously on the heart and the eye in a way that does not refer immediately and perhaps most easily to the obvious charm of the images, the superb palette, and the endless tonal harmonies. Instead the images create some unstructured world which lies just beyond the subconscious edge. It is there that the images gather all ones senses and faculties into a stunning moment of recognition.

But recognition of what? The line of the paintings seem for the most part abstract, with only subtle symbols which may or may not indicate something like rain, or grain growing, or city streets, or the feeling of sun, or a house glimpsed in a wood. Or was that outline a trick of the light in the painting- what light there is. Nothing so clearly defined but there it is – of memory seeking to flesh out the recognition of a time or a place or a mood with an appropriate choice of colour or line or forms without edges. As friends we speak of her work as dealing with memory or recognition but she says this is not a conscious gesture.

Her work cannot be explained within the work of her generation. It is neither ironic nor does it sit reference to popular culture. Rather it reaches to link into a long line of innovators who each in their own way were reaching for a transcendental language.

Claude to Ruskin, Ruskin to Turner, Turner to the Impressionists, Monet to

The Abstract Expressionists, Joan Mitchell to Twombly, it is all there. Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century painters called this visually emotive language “The Decorum”. With it they matched the time of the day, light and weather effects, architecture and social references to the central meaning of their images.

In the 18th Century Sir Joshua Reynolds proposed his theory of Poetic Painting. For Reynolds, painting like poetry meant “an expression of profound humanism, a beautiful voice, well and precisely chosen language, measure and imagery. You may well ask where and what is the imagery in Rajnish’s work. The answer is that they are the images that one brings oneself to the work. Recognition of a moment in ones life

and experience, the hour hand on the clock, rain, the smell of woods. They are experiences of myself, meeting within the painting the experiences of Rajnish and giving “recognition to our relatedness while accepting the other, dispelling for a moment the isolation and loneliness which is the modern human condition.”

Her works are resonant with echoes of other artists, their presence certainly not included by conscious choice. We see here the technique that Degas used for his pastel landscapes, building up the atmosphere in the space through the intricate crosshatching and weaving of disparate colours fusing them into a tonal poem. In her work the cacophonous sounds of a market, the sound of rain on the damp earth, all are conveyed by colour by this same technique so that her oils look like pastels.

While some might see in her work the voices of the Abstract Expressionists like Aurbach or Joan Mitchell but for me, one must look to Cy Twombly who is perhaps a peripheral member of this group. Twombly had his own voice which did not easily sit within that larger body of work. When Kirk Varnedoe, then the Senior Curator at Museum of Modern Art, New York wrote of Twombly’s work that critics dared not easily approach commenting that “his inclusion might disrupt that [Pollock to Warhol] story’s flow.” This flow which critics at that time said was not important and would certainly not influence anyone is quite alive and resonant in Rajnish.

We see that in fact Twombly’s voice is part of an earlier story line. From Turner who influenced his superb “Lepanto” series through Twombly and now, to a young Indian artist, trained in Delhi and London, picking up his linguistic and technical thread. Of whom are we speaking when we say that the artist uses “marking and schematic figuration,” “offhand impulsiveness and obsessive systems of re-working, the discipline, the sense of what has been discarded, over painted, withheld both seek these things. The differentiation of the real from the ideal- the ideal used to inform a shared emotion, place or time, poetry of alliteration.” The allusory use or non-use in Twombly’s case, of colour. The heavily weighted emotional references, images which remain just outside our field of concrete references. Rajnish is a continuation of that voice.

A wonderful sentence used to describe the work of Joan Mitchell may well apply to Rajnish’s work and give us a final overview, “A rhythm emanating from the expansiveness of the gesture or from the unrestrained use of colour and the pervasive luminosity and physical materiality conveyed the feeling of the dying sunflower”

Roberta Entwistle

Art Historian