Celebrating Existence in Impudence
They walk, dance, lift their heavy bodies up into the air, they migrate to the spaces that are conceivable and inconceivable, they exude the grandeur of transcendental ecstasy and they encapsulate the essence of characters that are universalized by various cultural constructs. At once they are living characters and sculptural metaphors.
K.S. Radhakrishnan's oeuvre embodies them all; the impish figures constantly engage themselves in defying the norms of a generic world and even the law of gravitation. This rebellious impudence and transcendental prudence so evident in Radhakrishnan's works have been carefully structuralized by the artist for the last two decades in order to generate an aesthetic discourse in which the history of art/sculpture and the history of a creative individual's forays into social criticism find a meeting place.
In Radhakrishnan's thoughts and deeds, there takes place a constant transformation of the human world into something ethereal, mythical and supernatural. Witnessing, confronting, engaging and articulating the real world are carried out through subjecting them to a world that lies beyond the direct human perceptions. This deliberately designed expansive process of filtering the real into the imaginary helps the artist to speak of a local scenario which could become emblematic of the universal. The mythological narratives that are embedded in his sculptural 'actions' then could function as surrogate re-presentations of the 'real' and the 'immediate', thereby achieving the stature of universal metaphors open to multiple interpretations.