Artist : Viraag Desai
Title : Gazing
Medium : Acrylic, ink, gel media on canvas
Size : 26” x 36”
Year : 2013
A BFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago – 2005, Viraag Desai has returned from L.A. to set up studio in Kolkata, where he paints, designs and curates. He is actively involved in promoting the growing contemporary art scene in India.
Although Viraag has worked with many media, his journey as an artist is taking him into wildly experimental phases where he produces huge three-dimensional works using extremely uncommon media.
While initially taking an expressionistic approach towards traditional art forms, such as Tibetan ‘thankas’, and ‘pata’ paintings of rural Bengal, his more recent works blur the lines between abstraction and representation, space and surface. They deal with the ideas of consciousness, sexuality and decadence, using a variety of unconventional media. His use of pure pigments and a variety of chemicals, such as polyurethane and resin, encaustic medium and stencils are an attempt to take the work out of the realm of ‘image’ - to create an object that can provide a multi-sensoral experience. This often makes his style fragmented, with semi-abstract surreal forms.
This work was done during a residency in Spain. The artist has used ink, paint and texture to give the work a three-dimensional quality.