Three sides of the canvas

A still from a video of Raghava’s art on Instagram

People tend to exist within binaries. Left vs right. Tall vs short. Black vs white. We tend to forget the shades of grey. There is a middle ground between tall and short. There's a centre between left and right. Artist Raghava KK's new art project, Eye Candy, focuses on that cusp. His aim is to explore three key ideas - Side A and Side B, which depict the contrasting sides of an emotion (say, love and hate), and what he calls ‘Play', which is the point of resolution that you reach when these two binary emotions collide.

That might sound abstract, but it's not really his intention to make sense of things in a traditional manner. Even the presentation of his art is off the beaten track. Raghava has painted on canvas. But the artworks are displayed in an audio-visual format on Instagram, with videos and music embellishing the viewer's experience. It's a hybrid route he's chosen, something that came about after a conversation he had in September 2020 with Anto Philip of youth organisation Under 25 Studios. Together, they conceptualised how art can be presented in a novel way in a pandemic-riddled world.

Raghava KK

It wasn't an easy year for Raghava. He went through a divorce with his wife, Netra, moving back to India from the US to set up a new life in Bengaluru. "This happened at a time when everything in my industry was also disturbed," he says, referring to the body blow that the lockdown dealt the art world. But even when things fall apart, the centre can hold. Raghava, Netra, and their four children - Rudra, Anaga, Jaya and Aadya - are collaborating with each other to reach an amicable conclusion. Maybe that's what ‘Play' really means. It's the resolution that exists between union and separation.

Log on to @raghavakk on Instagram