Project 88 is pleased to present Annex and Dissever, Khageswar Rout’s first solo exhibition at the gallery. Drawing inspiration from organic forms, Rout renders complex vegetal matter in his intricate sculptures. By eternalising objects that evolve continuously within their lifespans, he examines the space between the perpetual and the obsolete.
For Rout, “a symbol is related to its referent only by convention. Signs can never have definite meanings, for these meaning must be qualified, continuously.”
In his work, Rout problematises the act of reading or representing signs in nature through rational frameworks. His architectonic depictions of the designs found in sensitive pods, flowers, fruits, vegetables, and even barks of trees, expose their inner arrangements. Acutely aware of their spontaneous growth patterns, Rout highlights how regularising their structures into sculptural forms demands a negotiation between reason and instinct. While plant bodies are highly integrated by design and function, the intrinsic sense of order that their disciplined patterns seem to embody is misleading. Nature evolves only by responding to nature, not to reason. Attempts to decipher fixed codes in organic objects may transport us into addictive annectant modes, reckoning with linkages and connectors that seem coherent, but are made up.
Inviting considerations of enforced calibrations used to produce conventions, or in this case, seemingly hyper realistic sculptures, Rout’s works shake the foundations of ostensibly eternal constructs. Through his own deliberations surrounding the production of static representations of dynamic objects, Rout highlights the fault lines associated with the seemingly everlasting yet arbitrary hegemonic paradigms that govern our world. While accepting more than one understanding of logic might only stretch the boundaries of inherently restrictive frameworks, Rout proposes an explosion of the ‘structure’ itself. Through highly sensitive, tactile, and self-reflexive portrayals of the natural world, he explores larger questions surrounding perceptions of order.
