Deciphering
the equation of perfume and revelation
Frame
by frame, these paintings are about possibilities inherent in the language of
this world, the acts of reading and looking...'stop'...turquoise, its pigment
is rubbed onto the canvas. The colour of red here does not represent blood, but
perhaps a friend. What is it about conversations? We need to spend more time
talking to these ladies; we could talk food, recipes, make up, cosmetics, how
to get from here to there and a topic about some form of confusion with today’s
market economy. Take it apart...'stop', ‘everything feels right for this
moment’, ‘suddenly’ is not as good as ‘immediately’... definitely. From top up,
take it all out, put it back in, flatten it, and then see if it reacts back
without shouting at you. The colours of the world are in your eyes,...don't
look at the rainbow, look at me! Theories, colour theory...faster, ‘stop’! Put
it there, put it together, get them together, keep it together. It’s a face
that appeared from the perfume of your painting!
An
Interior monologue while thinking about Rajinder's paintings of faces
Compression of instances and possibilities,
the articulation of sensual situations derived from memory and mapped by
systems. These are some of the elements depicted in these paintings. Studying
these paintings, one is dazed by the space of mathematical information; one
also experiences the formation of a face and in some cases, the appearance of a
suggested perspective portrayed by the depiction of humans/inhabitants within
the structure of the face/mask. The numbers could correlate to a number of
possibilities; time of departure, air travel or the possible measurement of a
particular face but it is not decipherable, buried at times by the act of
painting. It is not to be read or understood, but perhaps their presences
trigger within one self, a form of numerological experience.
Everything is connected, from all of
brokenness and all that is made whole. So the trace of painting is used to give
form to a face. The act of painting is rendered in relation to the information
of the presence and memory of numbers and matrixes. What is the act of painting
like and how does the numerical information dictate the painter to perform?
Number Trance Face
I see masks, the many manifestations of
painted faces confuse me. Suddenly, I am reminded of make up, masquerades and
several centuries of portraitures. The mask is made up of a sphere of numbers;
the numbers become a net to cover/protect the soul. While the eyes are looking
at me, the ears seem to be listening, but I cannot understand the numbers. Why
is it speaking in numerology?
I perceive that there are two momentary
spaces created by the face, one is of the present, the other is of the past.
This is suggested by demarcations between the grey tonal areas governed between
eyes, ears, lips and that of the abruptly coloured face. Within the sphere of
the face, the correlation of numbers seems to be tabulating for the present,
but not elsewhere in the painting. Could the eyes not keep up with it? Are they
blind to its information? But the eyes are really focal, they are alive, but in
another time, another space. Its duality could be read as the distance between
the mystery of the systems of our world and that of mortality. While the eyes
and ears may perceive such systems as indicative of mapping out certain
directions in our life, it however may not fully understand the equation of
such cosmic beauty. These are not simply portraits of faces, but depictions of
the distances that govern nature and language.
The distance in between nature and language
are what the painting seeks to address. Here, painting, layering and drawing is
evolved, explored to celebrate and reveal the suspensions between innocence and
knowledge. Pigments become faces that illustrate the larger issues of time and
space. The co relationships between the features of the face provide an
experience of separate events and elements, while the eyes of each portrait
play hypnosis, inducing us into the matrix;
Trance Number
Smile... is everything okay?
Ian
Woo- Programme Leader Faculty of Fine Arts, LASALLE College