“My work is mostly abstract drawing and painting, primarily in watercolor, pencil, and ink, and can be split into two distinctive categories: patterns and landscapes. The pattern style of artwork is influenced by my Indian background, specifically deriving from textiles. I feel the textile and pattern motifs that arise in my work are due to the meditative quality of repetitive marks. I use repetitive mark-making as a means of communicating a higher ideal, which is reaching transcendence through a creative process.”
Rachna Rajen practices a complex form of abstraction filled with references to both futuristic landscapes and visual Middle Eastern patterns of the present. This kind of symbiosis between traditional and modern makes her art exquisite and is the main reason why I’ve chosen her as the featured artist of the week.
It seems that for her, the shape is the primary means for sparking the dialogue between the artist inner core and the viewer. It is the same phenomenon that I’ve noticed in H.R. Giger- where shape, often grotesque imagery I could say,becomes the first violin in the entire symphony. There is nothing grotesque in Rachna Rajen art though-everything is smooth, shapes are perfect and the combination between shape and color is well balanced.
Her works are cryptic, nearly sequential in that they attempt a back-story and what energizes her paintings is the awareness of the constant struggle between tangible and potential. She calls her style “neo-abstract” but I am thinking of her as a surrealist in the original sense of the term, as Picasso meant:”something that is more real than reality.”
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