Rahul Kumar
Bhoomika Jain

Rahul is among the fortunate ones… he does not have to wait
for his art to sell to pay his bills, or to keep his conviction ridden
quirky creativity, sinuous. This he says is liberating! That is perhaps
why he succeeds “to use this medium to express, to honestly and
genuinely make art and not just beautiful objects. In fact, I’m happy
to make something that’s absolutely boring and ugly as long as it is
expressing what I really want it to express”. “Tribes or villages have
expressed their craft as a community expression and it becomes art
with individual expression”. That is what the erudite artist sets out
to seek. This consciousness, away from the anonymous, creative
tradition of India, came to him with his Fulbright scholarship, an
opportunity rarely offered to a studio artist that too in ceramics.
In the recent series at Delhi’s Art Heritage Gallery in a show
titled Astronomically Small, he adds more layers to his previous
one showcasing primarily a cluster of ultra-tiny pots, vis-à-vis
the large one’s that he had done earlier “his fresh articulations on
the enduring form of the pot are a means to address the duality
of solid and voids, vulnerability and strength, the organic and the
mechanical”. He tries to capture the opposites in as many ways
explicit as possible: through his contrasting use of diminutive form
with powerful color; “dichotomy between tiny and fragile, and
furious red; well finished and smooth textured pots resting upon
rugged and raw pedestals; their glamorous exterior as opposed to
the pedestal’s unkempt and natural demeanor”. Interesting idea
conceived and materialized, emblematizing humanity in a similar
sense, perhaps? Aren’t we as good as miniscule, thoroughly tiny
and fragile yet full of pageantry and exhibition like the presence of
the red on Rahul’s glittering pots that become a robust yet ticklish
reflection of human ego and endeavor fraught with the pain of
possession… of ‘I, me, myself ’ ? The idea gains vehemence as a
subtle undercurrent of satire