Baiju Parthan

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Born in Kerala in 1956, Baiju Parthan is considered to be an important new media art pioneer within the Indian contemporary art context. He successfully exhibited his first – and the first o fits kind in India- interactive digital installation ‘ Brahma’s Homepage’ in Mumbai in1999.He was also instrumental in contributing to the new visual language of Indian Contemporary art as one of the core figures who laid the foundation of ‘Mediatic Realism’ in painting. Baiju Parthan holds academic degrees in Botany, Painting, Comparative Mythology studies, and Philosophy. He has exhibited at various venues both national and International.

“Baiju Parthan’s art practice revolves around information technology and its impact on perception and meaning generation. His art explores how information streams alter our perception of reality and how new categories of experience clubbed under the generic term 'virtual' reshape our cherished ideas about the world. Technology in his work is primarily used as an interactive space’, where each node is a choice that branches out into an exploration of fluid boundaries of meaning, that suggests the ever present local within the global, and the human cogency. The mediums of his works are a commingling of his training in various fields. He at one makes paintings, digital images, installations, as well as translits or backlit display boxes.

He makes sophisticated play with the seductive images & slogan – wisdom of advertising & the media & at the same time he incorporates elements from popular religious iconography in his dream constructs, as he sometimes describes his artworks. Personally, he lives in a post-colonial concept of space where the world exists as a flux. Entering the domain of Baiju Parthan’s images is rather like entering a computer game, an experience of revelry in which you are dazzled by mysterious symbols, set afloat on a stream of cross references, stonewalled by coded instructions and rescued by escape routes that open up without warning.

In this regime of metamorphosis, forms change constantly, but certain hereditary patterns retain their force: garnering their energy from a polyphonic simultaneity of ancient and contemporary mythologies. He is entirely in synchrony with the underground history of out age, which is being shaped by dissident global movements of pacific anarchism, environmental awareness and spiritual regeneration in the catacombs and cathedrals of the Net. Parthan’s images attest to the swirling and chaotic ancestries we carry within us and they are a riddling collage of images and text that appeals to the sensuous apprehension even as it stimulates the intellect.” – Ranjit Hoskote.

Baiju in an interview about his works: “I never really plan and execute works. What is around me comes into my paintings. I have been creating works about globalization as a homogenization process. Though I've begun to explore political material in my work, I'm not taking an activist standpoint. First an image strikes me. I believe that certain images or motifs have an intensity that is apprehended on three levels, First physically (which is to say visually), then emotionally and then intellectually. There is an incubation period, when the image gathers elements, and creates its own pictorial space. And then there is the process of transformation, which is the process of painting. I try to actualize my mental vision of a painting, but more important than the details is to capture the picture's intensity. If I succeed at this, I am happy."