Ritesh Ajmeri’s work is about metaphoric landscape which incorporates past to present moment with body sculptures, drawings and performance videos. He questions how memory and remembering could be encoded from the skin to the brain, which we can contemplate between the roles of object and body in society where he is situated in India and South Korea. He traces what he is experiencing through color and remains of recalling; pigment, rust, figure, and time based recording, using his whole body images. Rust and time-elapsed physicality starts from the figurative format of his sculptures and continues to the abstract drawings and paintings.
Read MoreWhat he is dealing with is somewhat political but still very private regarding happenings around him. He can pick up some meaning from a very specific moment in reality, all the freckles in time which could be re-encoded and decoded into very formal manner, creating different results to viewers. In ‘Winding Time’, he became a living object through the whole day, chasing up sunlight, recording variations of time. Sun penetrates skin and impresses various meanings in the brain and Ajmeri re-interprets it onto different forms of works. Ajmeri is challenging more panoramic views from part to part, skin to skin, eye to eye and brain to brain, especially color to color adapting rust in many of his works.
In ‘Rusted Skin’ series, Ajmeri questions how he can neutralize human skin colours. He takes impression of his skin surface with Microscopic camera, which then he draws and paint in rust. Hence his work details are composed with tiny, smooth and soft dots, looking like abstract landscapes.
He traces what he experiences by using colour and remains of memories. His essential raw material like pigment, rust, body and time based recording, is therefore the traces that become a new experience which are visually archived. Hence time base recording is the main significant focus of his interest.
Text courtesy Exhibit 320.
