NYAB Event - Kanishka Raja "Against Integration"

Kanishka Raja "Against Integration"

Van Doren Waxter

This event has ended.

The exhibition will feature new multi-panel paintings by the artist and a wall painting created on site in the front room of the gallery.

In Kanishka Raja’s depicted realms, private and public domains from disparate global settings interlock in a complex visual field comprised of multiple panels and variegated perspectival windows. Raja charges these lush and energetic domains with pulsating patterns drawn from his engagement with textile design and ornament. Inspired by Italian 15th Century “Ideal City” paintings that proposed model urban landscapes and demonstrated the principles of perspective, Raja’s new works are windows onto contemporary urban societies. He presents spatially and contextually incongruent views through settings ranging from banal office spaces, to communal points of meeting. Sports arenas or shopping malls encounter zones of global conflict and sites of manmade or natural disasters such as a flooded domestic interior or a stock market trading floor. Raja lends a painterly, hand-honed quality to the works, creating composite realms that capture notions of both the technological and the handmade.

While the communities that Raja proposes are both disjunctive and visionary, the original source material for his compositions is rooted in documentary images. Raja relies upon the newspaper as his primary means of accessing world news. He selects pictures from articles, cuts them out to disconnect them from the specific event or place they once referred to, and then places them into an archive. He then chooses images from this archive and reformulates them into a new visual language, proposing a contemporary arena characterized by fragmentation, simultaneity, and interconnectedness.

[Image: Kanishka Raja (2010) oil on panel, triptych: 24 x 30 in., 24 x 18 in., 24 x 30 in.]