Feature

by Kartik Sood

Kartik Sood, a young, vibrant artist with a different kind of thinking believes that to become cutting edge artist you need necessarily do things consciously ‘as cutting edge’. When you have an alternative way of thinking, cutting edge happens, says Sood.

“In art to create is not to create from nothing”.

In my opinion, all art is cutting edge if it is trying to push the known limits of its own achievement so far. To be cutting edge, art does not have to go all the way and be pretentious. It can be subtle, yet pushing the limits and the limits are always subjective.

In my art, I have never tried to make visuals which pretend to be “cutting edge”. Rather, for me, the structural growth of the visuals, ideas, stories has been the priority. Perhaps that is cutting edge for me.  Art that grows form its own nourishment, that understands its own height and tries to make its shadow deeper.

I have used technology and also very primitive methods of expressing like drawing, but I have never used materials specifically to express newness in art scene. ’Something that has never been done before’ sounds childish to me because if one conceals the source, the appearance is deceptively genuine and new.  But it is not, everything is rooted in something else.

In my opinion, art that develops structurally ,bit by bit, is cutting edge every day in its own light, and that individual essence is what makes art original.

The structures that I have built up over years influenced by surroundings, which have appealed to my sensibilities form my language.

The language is forever developing. It is not an end in itself but more like a support system to express  what we have been trying since the beginning of humanity. The newness of experiences or the shifts in perceptions of daily life is the edge defining factor in my work.

If I use technology I use it in the same way as I use paint or a pencil. Where it is not the pencil that is important but what has been drawn with it.

Presently I have been working with multiple layers of semitransparent cloth, layerd upon pictures or paintings, and then hand painted. Also cloth layers framed and projected upon with videos creating lenticular visuals. Within this visual structure I try and weave in ideas and stories of life perceived by me. Technically this is a breakthrough for me. It is a new visual language as far as my visual knowledge goes, for me it is “cutting edge”.