Sale - Shirts by Ritesh Rajput C. [You may
contact Ritesh, before the stock runs out at +919740287208]
"Hmm! which shirt will look good on my father?" Ok, the white one is ok for my dad. But ....
But ...
But ...
Jokes apart ...
Well when I opened Ritesh’s email the photos of shirts and shoes of a pavement sale ambience is what titillated the curator to pick these works. A Faculty of Fine Arts, Maharaja Sayyajirao University passout cannot forget the lawn near the Sculpture Department. It was just this ambience that gave away Ritesh’s clever deceptive works which makes an onlooker rub eyes if they were told that these works are not cloth but stones like marble!.
Rajput Ritesh C. did his Masters in Visual arts in Sculpture from MSU, Baroda in 2016. He has received award such as the Mahendra Pandya Award – 2012, Jairam Patel Award – 2012, National Exhibition of Art CVM – 2015, Gujarat Lalitkala – 2015 and India Art award – 2017. His works are present in Delhi, Bhopal, Baroda, Israel.
Ritesh’s practice explores the possibilities
of the materials he is interested in. He constantly reorients the apparent
characteristics, make and rigidity of surfaces like marble, metal and stones
rendering a sense of ductility and malleability to it. His works then are
labourous reproductions, ‘manufactured’ just like the original utility objects
he chooses – shoes, slippers, garments and toys among a bevy of commercial
consumer goods. He sets his sculptural installations in spaces that are general
stapling his work to the ‘working class households’ and their ‘utilities’.
Ritesh reappropriates context and thus explore mediums and their possibilities,
using them as metaphors for the common man and his materials. His practice can
be understood as one that is material oriented, where he constantly re-orients
the materials to make new identities and meanings taken from everyday life.
Here I significantly work with utility objects that make it to smaller, more
accessible markets such as flea markets and unorganized bazaars – where the
fresh and the used – form affordability for most of middle class India. Ritesh
intuitively react to an experience turning them into a memoir in the form of my
art. Toys then are a constant metaphor to act of playing that comes in the form
of visual, weight and interactivity in his works. He tries to manipulate the
original iconography of the medium say for example stone and construct new
objects that are almost the opposite of this iconography – a T-shirt for
example – light, stretchable, loose and flexible. This re-identification is
core to his inquiry where he constant try to access the emotions of the
audience such as wonder, joy and shock when they interact with Ritesh’s
sculptures. His colour palette is an echo of the colour trends of the market
and the market as a symbol of multicultural existences; and is thereby loud and
pop catching the eye. The themes of his practice are largely derived from the
society around us and its realities depicted in the sense of weight and matter
– like an small piggy bank carrying a large 1/100-rupee coin. His intended
visual cursors are the senses of sight and touch leading to a certain element
of fun.
Ritesh work to create a large body of the same objects to understand both
demand and production, and deal with the idea of the artist ‘manufactured’.
This mass production in itself forms my space of thought where his main focus
is to make his chosen material look like another altogether. Ritesh’s process
includes researching on the site, where he begins by observing and documenting
shops, stalls, objects and people. His practice strives to catch the technical
aspects, as well as the essence of a space or an object. This has not only
helped him curate his ideas, objects and thereby his sculptures. Ritesh is now
working with site-specific installations recreating places that people can
visit and interact with.
