RAJAN ONE, an exhibition of artist CK Rajan’s early works, is the first half of a two-part exhibition at Galerie Mirchandani + Steinruecke, providing a clear but subtle look into the artist’s practice. The exhibition, which features works created after 1990, highlights an artist who has consistently pushed against spectacle, developing a modestly scaled, conceptually dense, and subtly politically charged style.
Rajan’s work, as both Grant Watson‘s curatorial framing and Anita Dube’s deeply personal reflection suggest, is inseparable from a history of radical aspiration and its aftermath. Emerging from the ideological landscape of the Kerala Radical Group, Rajan carries forward what Watson describes as a “slow fuse” of radicalism—no longer polemical, yet still quietly insurgent in form and method.
Dube’s evocative portrait, The Man Who Would Be King, positions Rajan as both insider and outsider: marked by a “rural proletarian consciousness” and navigating the exclusions of class and race within Indian society. She paints an image of the artist in a “very white shirt”—a symbol of dignity amid scarcity—becoming an apt metaphor for the work itself: austere, precise, and insistently self-possessed. If the Radical Group’s ambitions fractured after the death of KP Krishnakumar, Rajan’s practice emerges as a sustained, solitary inquiry into how aesthetics might still carry political resonance without overt declaration.
Mild Terrors
The exhibition’s emotional and conceptual core lies in Mild Terrors, Rajan’s celebrated collage series. Here, the artist C K Rajan turns to mass media—newspapers, magazines—cutting and recombining fragments into jewel-like compositions that are at once seductive and disquieting.
Watson’s reading situates these works within a broader history of collage as critical practice. Yet Rajan’s context is distinctly Indian: the early 1990s moment of economic liberalisation, when visual culture itself underwent rapid transformation.
These collages track that shift not through direct critique but through dense, often uncanny juxtapositions. Bollywood glamour collides with images of rural labour; scenes of violence puncture aspirational interiors; the female body recurs as both architectural and erotic motif—fragmented, scaled, and reinserted into unstable urban landscapes. Meaning resists closure. Instead, the works operate through visual puns, disjunctions, and intuitive leaps, producing what might be called an “ideocratic” field—where images govern thought as much as represent it.
In Search of Utopia
The exhibition opens with In Search of Utopia, a foundational series of miniature paintings on the inside of cigarette packets. These works condense vast architectural imaginaries—cityscapes, observatories, stadiums—into fragile, discarded supports.
Yet Rajan’s utopias are pointedly diminished: populated, if at all, by matchstick figures adrift in vast, impersonal environments. The cigarette packet—an object of consumption and disposability—anchors these visions in the everyday, collapsing utopian aspiration into a twisted material joke.
Table Top Sculptures
This dialectic between objecthood and representation continues in the Table Top Sculptures. Primary-coloured boxes—geometric, almost pedagogical in their simplicity—contain partially concealed items: a gun, a toy car, a brick. These works resonate with the still-life logic of the contemporaneous Survivors drawings, where objects are arranged with both deliberation and unease. Rajan’s boxes, however, introduce a sharper tension: the banal object becomes latent with violence or narrative potential. A toy car is no longer innocent; a gun glimpsed through an aperture becomes an image of threat suspended in formal restraint.
Notes, Notebooks, and the Artist’s Method
Running alongside these bodies of work is Rajan’s sustained engagement with notebooks—spaces where drawing, writing, and speculation intermingle. These are not preparatory in a conventional sense; rather, they form a parallel practice, a testing ground for ideas that later manifest in sculpture or collage. This recursive movement between media reinforces the sense of Rajan’s oeuvre as a tightly woven, internally coherent system.
A Practice of Modesty and Resistance
Across RAJAN ONE, what becomes striking is the consistency of Rajan’s visual language: small scale, graphic clarity, and a preference for the everyday object as both material and subject. Watson aptly describes the work as a “beautiful puzzle,” in which pieces across decades interlock without ever resolving into a single statement.
Dube’s framing deepens this reading by foregrounding the lived conditions of the artist—his marginality, his physical fragility, and his refusal of spectacle. If contemporary art often gravitates toward the monumental or the sensational, Rajan’s work insists on another mode: intimate, մտածված, and quietly defiant.
Through collage and construction, Rajan “cuts into images of a commodified world,” reassembling them into spaces where he can, if only momentarily, claim sovereignty.
RAJAN ONE is less a retrospective than an excavation of a sensibility: one that navigates between radical history and private imagination, between humour and unease, between the political and the poetic. It reveals an artist for whom modest means are not a limitation but a method—one that sharpens perception, distils experience, and sustains a quietly radical vision over time.
In its restraint and depth, the exhibition offers a compelling reminder: that subversion need not ঘোষণা itself loudly; it can persist, patiently, in the smallest of gestures.
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