MOMENTS OF REFLECTION: DRAWINGS FROM RAJ REWAL
November 12 - December 01 , 2024
Architect
Raj Rewal is best known for his architecture that deeply engages with the
aesthetics of symbolism and storytelling from the many traditions in India; and
these are often coupled with interesting architectural renderings expressing
ideas through imagery and colour. In this exhibition we get a peek into some of
his very early drawings which he did around the time of his return to India
after studies abroad. Broad-stroke colours and forms playfully abstracted into
minimal linework or geometric patterns seem to be the underlying exploration in
these drawings. These were drawn in his notebook, a small format size, with
very basic drawing tools, a way in which he probably engaged in studies of
spatial organization but also narrative building.
These
drawings square up the two-dimensional paper space in quarters that come
together to create depth and offer a spatial arrangement. Then figures in bold
colours often rendered in minimal linework, or abstracted patterns fill up the
spaces creating a storyboard or street scenography of sorts. Form and depth are
created through a play of different kinds of line contours, surfaces of
stippled strokes, patchwork of coloured shapes – geometric or otherwise, and a
whole scene is built up, like a stage set or a scenography for puppet theatre.
Traces of Bauhaus or the New York Moderns, or a Paul Klee, are floating in
these drawings in the way surface and colour, or lines and depth, play with
each other to create visual narrations. However, Rewal was also at this point
getting into a deeper study and appreciation of the Indian and Iranian
miniature painting traditions, and clearly these drawings are structured in
that style. Drawing the paper surface into drawers, and then characters
emerging from or within these drawers, characters who took shape as a result of
play between colours and line-types, animates a kind of miniature life-theatre,
like a stage prop or doll-house.
The drawings are sharp on observations of the
Indian environment Rewal was making notes of, but their leitmotif is a sense of
playfulness; as Rewal puts it “each blank page was both a challenge and had a
calming-amusing-serious concern.” Often miniature paintings were about royal
and elite lives, but here Rewal was interested in making notes by way of
drawing the everyday scenes in India, as well as the culture and politics of this
land in the 1960s. The exhibition also brings two architectural models in the
midst of these drawings – pertinent architectural projects that played with the
aesthetics of Indian imagination, through symbolism, abstracted imagery and
creating a kind of playground of spaces with architectural characters, bold in
their form and material detailing. In the context of these drawings the
architectural models read more like storyboards of ideas, reflections in form
and space unfolding, than simply representations of buildings in a scaled
model; they bridge the moments of reflection to thinking in architecture.
-Kaiwan Mehta
Images
Installation
