The aesthetic core of ceramic artist Rahul Kumar’s fresh-off-the-wheel artwork, displayed at New Delhi’s gallery Exhibit 360, lies in expressing the obscure with abstract. His 10th solo exhibition of ceramics, The Untold Resides Somewhere, is a labyrinth of emotive, lexical and metaphorical expressions for “preserving the discarded and communicating by not telling”. He says, “Is it not a fact that a song unsung or a letter not posted still resides at some place? Sometimes hidden away at the back of our bookshelves and often deep within our memories? I ask the viewers to engage with the works — to ask themselves what it means to withhold, to assemble the broken, to be introverted, or collect the shards — literally and metaphorically.”
A trained studio potter, Rahul is making a conscious attempt to deviate from his past experiments with clay. His focus now drifts from moulding the perfect earthenware to articulating a narrative sculpted with textured wall mounts, boxes and installations. “I began with leaving my mark by altering a perfectly made pot form. My Masters that I earned on a Fulbright Scholarship equipped me to use the medium to express. I have in the past played with scale: made diminutive scaled works and massive installations. I have used colour and gloss extensively. Over time, I began to use clay and all its tedious processes merely as my tool. What remains at the core of everything I do now is an ability to tell a story,” he shares.
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