Overview
Rahul Inamdar orchestrates minimalist procedures to express a complexity of emotion. The current series which was mostly made during the pandemic, uses Inamdar’s original additive and subtractive techniques and processes that are a signifier of postminimalism.
Wordless thought in colour, the new series ‘Reduction’ brings a heightened perception and imperceptibly resonates in individual ways with textures of imagination and memory. The title refers to the concerns that have propelled Inamdar’s work over the past many years- how to remove traces of his influence and control on his work.
Works
Notes
Artist Note
Reduction requires one to understand the colour. The range isn’t necessary, even a single colour when listened to, can hold the viewer’s breath.
The application of colour reflects the maker. How is the colour transferred from the bottle to the canvas, how fast or slow ? How long is it allowed to stay? How frequently is it added or removed?
The subtlety of a work is simply a record how well the maker understands the colour.
The purified linseed oil along with turpentine is more than the mute bystander it’s assumed to be. Like the rain drop quenching the parched earth or waves moving, tossing the sand, the medium brings it all together. It slides, glides, moves, and drops- responding to angles, to surface texture, to gravity, to time, leaving very little beyond traces of transparency.
The third dimension is the canvas.
An unprime canvas with a wave that is exposed, is hungry to absorb every drop of pigment and oil at its own pace.
A line drawn or a dot dropped on an unprime canvas dissolves in the oil. Moving through the waves it becomes space in the expanding blot of oil, till it pleases.
The maker brings all the elements together and thus gets to see the work come to life.
The work never looks the way it looks when it’s born. As it dries, colours open up. The oil yellows every time the work is observed, it brings forth a detail unseen, felt as if absent before.
Through this ever-evolving perception, the work grows in the mind of the observer.
