An Inner Retrospective

#AN INNER RETROSPECTIVE BY LAXMA GOUD

With curatorial inputs from Marta Jakimowicz The imagery of K. Laxma Goud comes from the experience of an insider who probes the village with a fierce but affectionate frankness and an instinctively metaphoric sensitivity. Both strands swap as well as fuse in a complementary, rather than contradictory, process on a trajectory between the sensuously immediate and the poetically distanced. His characters with familiar clothes and ornaments, gestures and a rough but exuberant spirit are not individuals but embodiments of rusticity. Their corporeal and emotive bonding underscored by pleasurable, fertile eroticism, sometimes bawdy or violent and sometimes tender, participates in the cycle of nature, in a mysteriously symbiotic proximity to animals and luxuriant plants, as ordinariness mingles with irrationality and the eerie. Indulging in and overcoming the contradictoriness of art and craftsmanship, the artist steers and occasionally stops between the instinctual and the classicizing, the animated and the design-like, the angular and the smoothly rounded. He uses a number of alternative or simultaneous mediums in tune with his responses to reality, all of those remaining anchored in the dominant line. The centrality of drawing, acquiring many manifestations in his prints, overwhelms even his works in colour and paintings. Although he has never held a proper retrospective, his working method involves an inner conversation through the many phases of his career. Every once in a while he dares himself to look anew at what he did in a certain way earlier, the diverse techniques opening new forms and ethos that impact mutually. Periodic changes let him go forward a little while going back a little too. If not exhaustive as a retrospective, this show offers Laxma’s ample reinterpretations and reinventions that approximate the feel of his internal impulse to retrospect.

• Marta Jakimowicz