NITIN VADUKUL
Entering an exhibition by Nitin Vadukul, is to enter a secular labrinth inhabited by the icons of our deepest fears. Humans and surrealist creatures engage our uneasy attention, all the more disconcerting because of a common attitude of indifference which they exude toward us, the fragile, earthbound and sometimes helpless victims of their unleashed powers.
Some artists place their imagination under cultivation. Others place their’s at risk. Nitin Vadukul, on the other hand, likes to inhabit the uncertain gap between the two. His camera is the paramount tool, but what it exposes is then laboriously and imaginatively enhanced in order to give form to metaphysical forces that the lens alone cannot capture. So, after capturing images through the reflex eye with the highest degree of technical skill and accuracy, the artist sends them through a digital process where they are reshaped and rendered more idiomatic, making this visual realm uniquely and undeniably his own.
By age twenty-five, the artist had mastered photographic process. Armed with these essential tools and his inquisitive drive to demystify the world, he refined his mastery in China, Venezuela, Russia, Paris, Poland, Africa, and just about all points in between. But always there was this searching, this seeking to give awe its own shape. What do the invisible forces, the spirits of fear, doom, tyranny, mysticism, avenging demons, advanced beings, creatures and forces leaking into the human realm and mind look like?
Among the emblematic deities you will meet in this art form are fighter pilots in antique cockpit regalia. Their faces are covered by the mirror-black, plastic visors of their helmets. Their’s is the power of the divine, the capability to annihilate us, tens of thousands at a time. They do not see the faces of their quarry either. What and who unleashes their wrath? What gods have we offended in order to deserve their devastating rain? What inhabits their dead hearts?
A gigantic fly sits above the world. A serene killer shark glides in the sky over a pastoral lake setting. Scarecrows with demonic heads and attenuations are crucified in dark landscapes instinctually akin to our most terrifying subconscious states. Towers and pedestals, like transformers of fear, mock an architecture unrelated to social interaction. Skulls encased in an ethereal smog of life and afterlife threatening us with our own mortality. As we move from one obsessive pictorial characterization to another, we thread a metaphysical trail into a cavern of frozen spells.
These are some of the subjects of this artist’s art practice, subject matter which gives these works control of both the exhibition space and the viewer’s mind. But it is not only the subject matter that compels our attention. The prints themselves are crafted with the traditional sensibility of a master of process and respect for the viewer. Archival paper and inks provide a rich, sensual depth to both the work of art itself and to the unsettling imagery. This area of knowledge is the sort that can come only from experiences within the craft itself. It is further enriched by an immersion into the artist’s own world-around. These are scenes from his own existence.
To some extent these icons leave the exhibition with the viewer. They colonize the mind. Even more deeply, but no less vividly, they begin to dwell in the subconscious, giving form to our otherwise unformed sturm und drang. In existential terms, invisible forces shape our being as much as visible forces, perhaps much more so. Is this artist’s disturbing landscape part of the divine plan or outside of it?
Vadukul is unsatisfied with perception alone as interpreter of our world. Beyond the lens, on the other side of the eye, the vision of this contemporary creator aims to include the harrowing unseen for our scrutiny. The fortunate collector of such an art work becomes, at one and the same time, the recipient of this larger iconography of awareness.