Baiju Parthan

            

Born in Kerala in 1956, Baiju Parthan is a cutting edge artist who lives and works in Bombay. He has done his BSC in Botany, studied painting from 1978-83 at the art school in Goa and he has a Master’s degree in Comparative Mythology at Bombay University. In 1995, Parthan began studying computers, learning hardware engineering, building his own machines and creating programmes. Parthan began to study the Indian mystical arts, exploring tantra, ritual arts, and Indian mythology. Simultaneously, Western art continued to exert an influence.

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.

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