‘I Float, You Rise’: The art of Rahul Chauhan
I Float, You Rise by Rahul Chauhan (2022).
In his work, Rahul Chauhan interrogates the democratic, new-age space aura of technology to develop a coronation of colour, a palpable palette with a touch on the canvas, a wonder and other-worldliness.
The inspiration for this work is staged on the premise of a new world, a parallel world created by technology and one where proliferating alter-human agencies take form. With convincing credibility, this attractive universe—manifested through patterns of information and entertainment—smoke screens the dystopic sights of human decay. We live in a world of virtual abundance which has emerged not just as a means to communicate, but one to survive effectively. A despotic reality of our times.
Rahul Chauhan’s oeuvre of artwork swarms with metaphors that embrace utopian, fantastical, humanistic, and spiritual ideas, such as those recited in various philosophies through centuries. In these radical times—where there is a mass explosion of human beings—there is also a parallel virtual world with a ‘mathematics explosion’ of algorithms and codes. Fast spreading, easily-attained digital imagery and mind-blowing photography are accessible to all. As a part of this circuit, through his work, Chauhan scrutinises the idea of ‘changing with time’ versus ‘sticking to what one wishes to do’. To elaborate, he says that amorphous technological entities perform as proxies replacing the human hand and intellect. Chauhan attempts to move away from this evolving perspective and retains his world through his love of brush and paint.
“I enjoy painting and its process and the time it takes. Each detail, each stroke and the journey they take, the labour while slowly and bit-by-bit moving towards a vision… It’s like negotiating with the canvas. Bribing it with colours and exchanging them by hand.”
The images in Chauhan’s paintings are strewn with references from Hindi literature, myths and stories from oral traditions and his existential realities. He completed his Master’s degree in Art Education from Jamia Millia Islamia, Delhi in 2007. In conversation with him, he revealed to me that, during his college years—along with developing skills to understand community building through art education and painting—he was drawn to the study of nature. The impressionists’ approach to capture light and colour by painting outdoors was influential in developing the palette for his paintings. Eventually, an array of new images appeared in his narratives.
Chauhan said that he grew an interest in Hindi literature and Sufi poetry; a casual incident of buying a book by Munshi Premchand—who was a pioneer of Hindi and Urdu social fiction stories—on a train journey brought back memories of other stories he had read as a child. His own experiences of growing up in Dibiyapur (Uttar Pradesh), leaving his home to pursue his education in Delhi, and observing a metropolis with all its complexities laid bare every day, made the realism of Premchand’s literature extremely appealing to him. These experiences ran parallel to radical advancements in technology world-wide, and they together broadly framed the narratives of his work as a full-time dedicated painter.
Chauhan’s arrival in Baroda about a decade ago exposed him to a wide genre of artists working in the city further expanding his horizon. Over time, the imagery in his work attained a more narrative and figurative style, while retaining the impressionist palette learnt during his college years. In most of his work, using surrealist imagery, Chauhan questions the irony of the narrow human mind still prevalent in our societies including the segregation of society on the basis of caste, colour and religion and perpetuation of such dogmas through modern technological means.
While engaging and interacting with the artist about his artistic journey, and why he paints with his choice of medium (oil on canvas), Chauhan says “I enjoy painting and its process and the time it takes. Each detail, each stroke and the journey they take, the labour while slowly and bit-by-bit moving towards a vision. It’s all very exciting. It’s like negotiating with the canvas. Bribing it with colours and exchanging them by hand.”
“I do not know how the pink or the yellow would look,” he adds. “I let my imagination lead me. It is a trial-and-error process. But the surface retains the error. The error reveals labour. There is no delete like on a technological platform”.
Chauhan has always been interested in stories. Stories of hope, oneness of spirit and a synchronised togetherness of humanity. Technology enables that. It connects people and creates a utopia through its extensive knowledge and highly-developed perceptions that it shares through its network of fibre routes, within the rapidly moving circuit. Yet what is lost is the minute, the unfathomable, the essence, the mystery of the unknown. The feel of the singular. The painter feels this through passion.
I Float, You Rise (Detail) - by Rahul Chauhan
While talking about his present work, Chauhan says that in technological creations, the expression of passion is compromised. There are many elements and channels for its makings. There is a code. It perceives its accuracy. A lot of labour too, with gambles of the mind. It is interrogated, dissected, convoluted into algorithms and proclaimed through text and images. The human ‘conductor’ is a part of the process. A painter is alone. What a painter creates is not perfect, it reveals strengths and falsities—an image, a mystery—revealing the secret, the artist, from its cocoon.
I Float, You Rise (Oil on Canvas - 2022) depicts a story about the loss and gain of power. A log of wood dead, seemingly imbecile, laying beneath witnessing the vastness of the high-minded monarch, a gigantic and luminous structure empowering, spread out as if a cosmic farce. The lazy log, like a painter is lonesome, twined by string of credence, distant and protected from the convincing cluttered enormity of new mediums and assemblages, out-witting it.
The work engages with the idea of the medium—not as a sublimate for dissent, but as a horizon to perpetuate. The oil medium performs as a metaphor for the conventional materiality, placed alongside the glittery establishment representing the virtual. Revealing an irony of this ‘non-tangible structure’, taking up so much space on the canvas, enticing the idea of how the new-age virtual world takes up space in our minds. This is what the cyber space does: it lets our imagination go wild, tempts us, makes it ‘almost’ real and fantastic. He further elaborates that the process of doing this work using the imperfections of hand and mind, the choice of colours having its magical conditioning, works as the idea for this work. The art of painting is thus in contrast to this new world order, which commands production through machinery.
The giant institution—creator of multiple universes, metaverses standing strong dependent on calculated faith—lingers on with notes of glaring lights, a tune resonating a rat race. The rhythmic patterns on the establishment appear disciplined, coded, perfect to the dot, synchronising a beating of many hearts and lost souls. The silvery network of stars above touch the atoms of a virtual hybrid structure, embodying millions of glittery codes, diminishing human touches, taking over the universe. Enamoured and provoked by the powerful, Chauhan interrogates this all-inclusive, easily accessible and ‘highly-legitimate', democratic, new-age space aura of technology to develop a coronation of colour, a palpable palette with a touch on the canvas, a wonder and other- worldliness. He questions this not-so-fictionalised perfect ‘reality’ of today through real ‘perfections’—imperfections of the hand touching into stories and fantasies. It is a hope of the tangible to come alive.
A painting demands its solitude, a test in time to stand apart, to not be robbed by the savagery of the computer-generated mediums. Art of this kind a struggle of the cultivation, this idea of perfect image-making, against the struggle of image creation by hand. A trembling, rumbling clatter of a textured picture appears not through shared codes, but through the singular actual smell and touch of paint and sweat. A painter—out-casted like the floating log—willingly detaches himself from the illuminated embodiment of virtual excess. The painting thus stands as a narrative of human reach, loss, hope and imagination.
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Nirali Lal is an artist and writer based in Baroda/Bangalore. She previously worked with Saffron Art as a Bangalore representative and as the Art Manager for The Artist Pension Trust in India. Her recent projects include Five Million Incidents (Goethe Institut, New Delhi in collaboration with RAQS Media Collective, 2020), The Nest (Anant Art, New Delhi in 2021, Space Alumni show, Space Studio, Vadodara 2020) and the Baroda March (Rukshaan Arts 2021-2022). You can find her on Twitter: @nirali_lal and Instagram: @niwawi_wow.
