IslANDs - Compressed Realities - Exploded Photoworks

Epilogue
By Dr.K.K Chakravarty
Gudjon’s design imagination encompasses the extreme
frontiers of the world, of the Atlantic and Indian Ocean,
Iceland and Himalayas, both prone to volcanic and tectonic
convulsions. He juxtaposes images drawn from the unutterable
solitude and heart-wrenching beauty of glacial snowscapes
with images of a machine civilisation. He unites them by
patterns latent in their deformations, induced by nature
or human agency. His work is a registral, textural, timbral
ensemble made of a partnership of painting, sculpture,
mosaic and mural, arranged in processional and recessional
planes. In a flitting spark of life in a transient moment, a
blend is created, of dissonance and repose, discipline and
freedom. History is revisited and overwritten with images
of Venus in Primavera, Christ at the Last Supper, Guernica,
Jallikattu bull fights, Sanctuary facades, naves and choirs,
squinches, arches, vaults, domes and ceilings of cathedrals,
topographies of land, waters, currents and mountains.
Faces and figures are fused and cognitively obliterated in
photo negatives of a mass of humanity, milling around to
describe a history of discontent. Architecture, old and recent,
lattice work, mosaic floors, piloti, releasing infill from frame,
tiger stripes burning bright, a deranged peacock, stamping,
pouncing bulls, are viewed through light and shadow. Ascetics
smoke hubble bubble, offer speaking hand gestures, wear
matted hair, hold tridents, tend fire and preach. Dark voids
of gates explode before us. The nocturnal face of structures,
mantled in shadow, is juxtaposed against their lit faces. Trusses
and buttresses, steel frames and painted glasses, a temple
pinnacle, truncated heads and busts framed in windows
are presented to view. A floating ship convergent images are
offered of skies, clouds, sharp, jagged, snow capped peaks,
traversed by the dark zoomorphic shape of a wandering,
dreaming, peripatetic soul. Tortured branches of trees, forests,
churned and tossed by cyclone, rock strewn deserts, glaciers,
icebergs immersed in water, cataracts roaring through
desolate snowscapes, digital landscapes animated by a cardiovascular
circulation and respiration of living forms are
shown as in superimposed layers of dark and white splashes
in photonegatives.
Exploded steel pipes and frames pierced by stakes look like
birds. These are hung with nylon ropes and etch a figural
pattern across the wall. Shadows nestle below the bars, on
the wall and ground. Mouths agape in conversation, the pipes
span a dystrophic rift. Paper rolls and slides on the ground,
dripping with white, to create a pattern across a museum
wall, which is hung with photo frames. Corded steel ropes,
sparkling, stellar shapes emerge from distant depths. Oil paint
and varnish pick out dynamic, twisted, anthropomorphic
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