segment (2006) Painting by Rajan Krishnan

Rajan M. Krishnan was born 1967, in Thrissur district, Kerala. In 1989, he did a Bachelor’s in (Economics) from Calicut University, Kerala. After which he decided to follow his true calling and signed up for a B. F. A. (Painting) at the College of Fine Arts, Thiruvananthapuram. He completed his Bachelor’s in 1994, and thereon pursued a Master’s degree at the Faculty of Fine Arts, M. S. University, Baroda, which he completed in 1996. His first solo, Little Black Drawings, Mounted in 2004 at Kashi Art Gallery, Kochi was very well received.

One of the few Keralite artists who decided to go back home and work from there, Krishnan’s art has always been very sensitive to his environment, reflecting the socio-cultural ethos he inhabit and works from. Krishnan uses landscapes or elements from his immediate natural environment as his “principle protagonist” to express his innermost, aesthetic proclivities whether in celebration, homage or protest. While his earlier works were more realistic, featuring land/agriscapes typical of the topography in Kerala, of late however, his imagery has changed significantly. Krishnan works in a mode of realism that is significantly not based on images culled from the media or photographs made by the artist, his hyper-realism instead draws from memory, impressions, nostalgia and a sense of one’s shared inherited histories. Representing a “post-agriscape”, his later works are often, bleak, fragmentary visions of a dry, sterile landscape that seems to be an echo of a time which once buzzed with activity. “Instead of paddy, concrete and consumerist debris grow in these fields.” While his early experiences and memories of growing up in a remote village in Kerala have had a strong presence in his early works this slightly sentimental nostalgia, now seems to be giving way for a more hard hitting, cynicism that strives to document the sudden and overwhelming transitions occurring in his environment (that acts as a microcosm for the state of affairs in the country at large). These works make a clinical, examination, up close and unforgiving, at those “un-done landscapes” that he once held so dear.

The artists lives and works in Kerala.

• Nationality: INDIA
• Date of birth : 1967
• Artistic domains:
• Groups: Contemporary Indian Artists