KYNKYNY’s latest online exhibition features the delightfully original and dreamlike art works of contemporary artist, Jasu Rawal, on view from June 22 to July 20. The astonishing abstract cosmos that the well-known contemporary artist carefully crafts is filled with everyday things. Kites, wine glasses, boats and houses, flow, fly and drift whimsically – weightless and free – utterly disregarding the principles of gravity. The laws of time and space seem quite irrelevant in Rawal’s surreal acrylics on canvas. Instead, the Bangalore-based artist animates his poetic, floating universe with radiant gradients and planes of colour and a mixture of shapes, symbols and patterns, as he transforms the objects of daily life into something exquisite and fantastical.

Rather than being viewed as static, disconnected frames, ‘Two of a Kind’ unfolds as an intriguing visual story. Pairs of paintings which are connected by theme, colour and tone are presented together, side by side. This coupling of art works heightens the viewing experience and showcases Rawal’s marvellous miniature worlds as part of a larger whole.

Heavily influenced by German artist Paul Klee, Rawal constructs mirage-like compositions that play with perception and reality and present a unique and personalised vision of landscapes and objects in his environment. His early experiments with figurative works soon gave way to a distinctive artistic vocabulary that mixes elements of abstraction and surrealism with highly unusual results: a regular still-life study, for instance, turns into a playful, shape-shifting landscape adrift in empty space or transparent fields of colour.

The techniques that Rawal, who hails from Kutch, Gujarat, incorporates are as unusual as the content of his works. A random selection of shapes and forms appear in a decluttered spatial arrangement. A unifying harmony is then created by using a particular colour in varying tones. In fact, colour is used as a powerful language of expression – the multihued palette of vivid and bold as well as soft and transculent tones stretches across the spectrum of intense orange-red, yellows, blues, blue-violets, greens, browns and grey. The minimalist art works are further layered with patterns of dots and lines, textures, and scripts that are juxtaposed with an assortment of daily objects.
‘Two of a Kind’ is both open-ended and expansive as well as small and intimate. It is recommended that you spend time and linger over them to experience their calming, meditative effect as well discover the intriguing minutiae.