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His current oeuvre Seven Oceans and the Unnumbered Stars features five sculptures and seven drawings. Deeply interested in the thoughts of Martin Heidegger, Rimzon is concerned with the question of “being” and the creation of new meaning through displacement of objects. Both these preoccupations are contained within this current series of sculptures and drawings, although they are conceptually distinct from each other.

Rimzon views the body as a container; a receptacle of violence and of generative possibilities, simultaneous holder of secrets and emptiness. Using mythic beliefs of Kabir and Buddha as a starting point, Rimzon has deliberately located his works in the present day, where every claim of faith and stated truth is subject to intense scrutiny. There are traces of such apparent opposites in all his sculptures. In the relief Mother at the Shrine, he presents a roundel with a navel in the center; a pregnant belly full of possibilities but also a metaphor for the perishable clay pot that Kabir considered symbolic of the vulnerability of human life.

The sense of secrecy and the unknown inhabits Rimzon’s drawings, emphasized by the omnipresence of enclosures and womb-like curved spaces. Although suggesting conventional “realism”, Rimzon however, has displaced the subjects from the space where they were originally observed; they are his “intentional objects of sight”. The absence of figures in his drawings communicates an oppressive silence expressing the human dichotomies of birth and death, life and destruction. The intonation of these drawings, as in the sculptures, is reflective of his distress with contemporary universal issues of violence and alienation.

Bodhi Art is proud to present N.N.Rimzon’s Seven Oceans and the Unnumbered Stars. The works shall be on display at Bodhi Art, New York from 20th September- 27th October, 2007.

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N.N. Rimzon pays obeisance to the worker — the one who turns earth into gold. His imagery, with suggestions of an elliptical story woven within a circle, is always potent, always incisive, but never inappropriate or exaggerated. At the centre of his circle stands a figure praying or offering thanks for his harvest. A harvest not necessarily of the tools that constitute the circle but that have been instrumental in blessing him with a safe booty. With the liberal use of sharp instruments, it won’t be far fetched to say that Rimzon’s renderings are inscytheful, cutting through our defenses. The artist originates from Kerala, one of the first states in the world to democratically elect a Communist government. And so it is natural that the political charge is reflected in his work and narrative. It would be interesting to see how the works in the current exhibition — which were made in the early ‘90s — would have been done now. For instance, would the artist’s tools of nature be replaced by mechanical ones? Not necessarily, because Rimzon's concerns are primordial and that can only be expressed through the use of basic objects and elements.

source mirchindani - [by manoj nair]