ART OF RELEVANCE AND GRIT

Artist Rajesh Chand

Aasray (Acrylic on Canvas)

I enjoy introducing artists – sculptors, painters and graphic artists – who have been doing sustained creative activity – to a sensitive, art-loving audience. Ofcourse, much is conveyed visually by an artist’s own work, but adding a word here and there helps, more so his creative personality.

Rajesh Chand from Bihar, mixes surrealism with satire. His concept of earth takes off from global warming. He uses match-box as a symbol of global warming and we get works like “Enjoy on a Hot Box” a young man sitting on a match-box, smoking right in the middle of an empty street of a metropolis (soulless houses for that matter). His act makes the already hot concrete locality hotter, which is hardly any reason to cheer. Rajesh develops this theme, that man’s use of energy is causing global warming to create a match box whose fire-kindling capability is a danger to life on earth. In a work like “Ashray” he seems to pose a serious question – can a match-box (excessive use of earth’s resources) be humanity’s shelter?

Hot Toy (Acrylic on Canvas)

This theme is climaxed in “Melting Earth”, which shows earth like a dripping yellow circle – almost a warming signal for the speeding humanity with its foot on the accelerator.

Rajesh thus delivers a message relevant to our times.

                                                                                 R.S. YADAV

                                                                                          Art Critic

Delhi