Kanishka Raja at Allston Skirt
Art in America, Nov, 2004 by Ann Wilson Lloyd
In his recent gallery installation, "Birth of an Earth," Kanishka Raja showed three large paintings (60 by 84 inches each, oil on canvas over panel) and one smaller piece (26 by 35 1/2 inches, oil on inkjet print on canvas). In addition, he swathed the floor in deep blue, wall-to-wall shag carpeting and painted an existing steel post with allover brown-and-black, faux-wood finish.
These extra touches echoed the institutional decor in Raja's colorful paintings of mundane public rooms, where skewed, bisected spaces are arbitrarily flattened, angled, foreshortened, or variously drawn into deep, absurd perspective. I Can Hear the Rain Down in Africa (2004) shows, to the right, a cross section of a gym with work-out equipment and, beyond a wall, an outdoor swimming pool to the left. I Swear I'm Gonna Leave Chattanooga (2004) depicts a nearly endless lineup of sinks and urinals in a men's toilet, next door to a motel basement function room casually strewn with music paraphernalia. The left side of My Heroes Have Always Been Cowboys (2003) is a vast space with blue carpeting and a curved wall with a Western scene. An adjoining anteroom with a few pairs of shoes and four rifles leads into a seemingly infinite hallway of motel-room doors. Cowboy Lite (2004), the smaller oil and mounted-print work, is a mirrored near duplicate.
Raja has been awarded the Boston Institute of Contemporary Art's Digitas/ICA Artist Prize, given annually to a Boston artist, which will include a solo exhibition at the ICA in January 2005. While his prior shows in Boston have included paintings with similar interiors--flattened, angled spaces with furnishings that lean toward the retro, funky and fake--these newest works are bigger, more complex and executed with brushwork that's more precise and confident. Especially in the context of an installation, their surrealism quotient has been increased.
The intriguingly vacant, oddly appointed scenes with their elastic dimensions could be places cobbled together from dreams, memories or fantasies; or they might be images conjured up in the artist's mind by his titles, most of which also name songs. Raja, who was born in Calcutta, educated in Massachusetts and Texas, and has lived the past few years in Boston, says in gallery information that the paintings are inspired by the true story of an Iranian man without proper travel documents who was unable to leave a Paris airport and took up residence there. Save for that men's room, none of the works resemble an airport, but they do have a sense of the bland interstitial moment, i.e., of being stuck in a nowhere between two somewheres. Despite their cheerful, familiar banality, Raja's nowheres are as unsettling as any.
COPYRIGHT 2004 Brant Publications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group
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