From Myths to Reality

Profile

Hyderabad based art writer Nisha Aggarwal profiles Mangesh Rajguru, a New Delhi based young artist who takes a lot of interest in depicting the mundane and their accidental connections with popular myths. Subtle irony and lampooning the middle class morals, spice up his works, observes the writer.

Artist Mangesh Rajguru

Ideas are the power punch of an artwork. When simple ideas born out of existential everyday life begets enquiry and passion, they converse directly to an inner core. This is the potency of the works of young artist Mangesh Rajguru. Born in Ashti, a village in Maharashtra, Mangesh is a fine arts graduate from Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi. Routine life is a place where he finds ideas, images and objects for his works. He currently lives and works between Noida and Delhi.

Mangesh’s art is vivid, vibrant and versatile. He started working with drawing and painting, experimented in print and collage, and is now enriching his orbit of expression through sculpture and installations. His works traverse from realistic to distortion, mythological to contemporary, handmade to readymade, two-dimensional to three-dimensional, rare to popular and traditional media to modern technology based media. It shows the multiplicity assimilated by freely mixing different languages or dialects, but all done with a calculated complexity and refinement.

Man-1 (An Early Drawing)

His images invite the past into present, developing a dialogue with possibilities of the future. Some of his early works are about going back, finding the personalities, and trying to insert and rediscover through his art. It provides him the range of available images and subjects, but also projects his depictions of new experience of time and place. The Padmapani Boddhisatva of Ajanta caves, Leonardo Vinci’s Monalisa, Christ with his apostles in the Last Supper, are some sought-after images of art history. Symbolically used, these images appear and then disappear in Mangesh’s early paintings. They evoke humour leaving a possibility of numerous interpretations for the viewers.

Last-Supper (Acrylic-Digital Print-Stumping-Foil on Canvas)

Even Chacha Chaudhary, a memory of his childhood, stands as a symbol of strength or power, and iconography of Goddess Laxmi symbolizes wealth and power. Mythological characters have been mingled with human figures to give them a ‘transformed’ tinge. For instance a snake tailed human (iconography of lord Vishnu) holding sun in his hands, depicts the desire of ‘enlightenment’, but the lotus on his body shows the vacant seat of an assessor, who could guide him in a unknown quest. He tries to seek audience with the world through mundane objects, believing that for intimacy one has to trust life and dissolve that which is public and personal. The same reflects in his large scale sculptures, as his art treads outside from personal space to become ‘public’ art with objects like scooter, animals, skulls as apt metaphors.

Chacha Chaudhary

The ‘scooter’, an Indian middle-class’s vehicle is his all-time favourite. Ranging from earlier drawings to recent sculptures and installations, it has a germane presence. With his scooter, a work titled ‘Euro 14’ he connects to the changing notions of the urbanized world. Human-made objects while heralding a new age of technologies, also prove to be a hazard to an organically delicate environment. Regardlessly people still seem to move towards it, armed with ‘silencers’. Here the scooter is an ‘instrument’ of progress and also of pollution. The second version of scooter titled as ‘aasan/throne’ announces his idea of global warming more precisely. This chocolate coloured contextual sculpture was displayed at Publica, India’s largest Public-Art Festival. The two-headed scooter, transforms into a throne complete with a carpet. Oxygen masks and cylinder, carrying metal ears instead of front mirrors are the ‘rescue’ objects to be used in any emergency. The iconography is of ‘Sheshashahi Vishnu’ where the empty seat is of Vishnu, of power/authority with silencers behind the seat emulating the ‘phan’ (hood) of ‘sheshnaag’ (thousand hooded serpent on which Vishnu rests). The arms beneath the vehicle depict how a human is burdened with a necessity of commute by a vehicle and how a vehicle commands a position of power on the roads as compared to walkers.

Euro-14

Aasan

Another volumetric sculpture ‘Arambha’(Beginning) also stands indicative of the posterity of our current eco-system. Here, Mangesh converges the bird/hen and human skull. As human beings and animals, the two biological constituents of an eco-system are on the verge of catastrophic destruction due to the imbalanced human greed, nature and animals are getting affected rapidly along with humans themselves.

Aarambha

More recently, Mangesh has started using the ‘soft toys’ as a medium. These soft toys are shaped up into bottles and pressure cookers; two shapes which themselves hint at the two opposites of male and female. The bottles in the installation depict male metamorphosis in an ascending from a milk bottle to soft-drink to hard-drinks. The pressure cooker hints at women being associated with the kitchen from childhood itself as the artist refers to his sister playing ‘house’ with toy utensils. To depict the passage of time, Mangesh has made the bottles rotate on an axis. This work was awarded The Ravi Jain Memorial Award from Dhoomimal Art Gallery.

Grha

Representing himself in a giant maze of creative pursuits, Mangesh Rajguru is fully aware of every little particle involves and evolves, thus making him a willing participant of this maze.

(First Appeared online in CartanArt Magazine, Issue-I, April 2014)