Hope in mixed media

Rajendar Tiku engages with art at different levels in his sculptures.

There’s something professorial about Rajendar Tiku, so at any moment you expect him to whip out a tome and point at you with a cane, to stand up and start elocuting, to explain things. Of course, that is being unfair, for Tiku is soft-spoken and given, himself, to explaining things rather than asking them.

There is an absent-minded air about him, but that might be on account of a temperament that could dissolve into existential mode about his chosen mediums, about their weight and size, for instance, about how they will look, about the effect of light on them, even — prosaically — how he will transport them over large distances for an exhibition.

 

“It is not very romantic,” he points out, “but I worry about things like transportation, how a work of monumental scale will travel…” It is an endearing facet about him, this unguarded honesty, his desire to be practical, and his ability to pack in small boxes a handful of memories that he has turned into sculpture, that he can carry with him wherever he wants, whenever he wants.

His memories are happy ones, even those of a house in Kashmir, its steeple the marker on which he’d set his sights when he came wading across fields of snow. That house is no longer there, but its memory is now reduced to a tiny 5x3.5x2.5 sculpture, fused together by marble and wood.

“I’m part of a culture that likes to keep things together, which is why you’ll see, in my work, how I contain materials, tie them together, suture them, nail them — wood and stone, or stone and bronze, or wood and terracotta. It’s like keeping life together so it isn’t fragmented…”

It’s the voice of an artist in Kashmir who doesn’t raise it in anger, or sublimate it in rage. “We must not take art to the level of a slogan,” he rationalises, “We must take the slogan and turn it into art.” His use of gold is that sense of hope, of optimism, or as he sees it in works like The Sprout, “of light coming through darkness”, or as he explains it somewhat more overtly, “like a positive note on the conditions we are going through”.

Tiku, 55, studied both science and law before he decided on a degree in fine arts, lured by the need to work with his hands, to create his own monuments to an age that is passing by, acting not as a historian but as an observer at a specific point in time. “I’m interested in archaeological sites,” he says, “but not in their historical context.”

In other words, he is in thrall about how the passing of time has affected particular stone monuments and sculpture. “I try and create affects so you get a sense of the passage of time on the surface.” It is the reason his sculpture is amorphous — “the impression,” he says, “of fleeting time on their surfaces”.

Nor is that his only sculptural device. He is wont to proscribe on his works the impress of calligraphy, of things noted and said — something he repeats in his drawings, however infrequent — a jumble of letters and alphabets: Hindi, Sanskrit, English… “It’s never anything readable,” he explains, “just a sense of something from bygone times.”

It is this constant harping to the past, to nostalgia — none of it bitter — that smoothens his works, but he insists he is an artist of the present. “Sculpture,” he insists, “has a language of its own.” You can try and figure out whether you understand it at Tiku’s ongoing show at Delhi’s Gallery Espace where “the byproducts” of some of his monumental works could become memories for you to treasure in your own boxes, before he carts them off to his own, more intimate space.