With palatial mansions painted in happy colours, pretty verandas and oyster shelled windows, it is no surprise that Goa's unique architecture with heavy European influences has commended the admiration of all. And the manner of the passing on of these styles has now been interpreted poetically by Austrain artist Rene Fadinger through his artworks which will be on display at the Morphology of Archive: Connected Histories of Goa, an upcoming exhibition at Museum of Goa, Pilerne which begins on February 13.
A native of Vienna, Austria, Fadinger, studied at the Institute of Fine Arts, drawing and fine art print at the University of Applied Arts, Vienna. Since 2012 he has been teaching at the Independent Academy of Fine Arts, Carinthia and divides his time between Austria and India. His approach to art is experimental and multi layered, combining different techniques to build three dimensional objects and his work has been exhibited in many solo and group shows like Villa Claudia, Feldkirch Alpen-Adria-Gallery, Klagenfurt and BV-Gallery, Klagenfurt. Keenly interested in the concept of space and time, his recent cross-media artworks focus on the metamorphosis from solid to gaseous state and reverse sublimation, inspired by quantum physics. “For me architecture is something alive, they are not just structures. I am concerned with the space outside and inside it and have come up with this fictive thesis that this empty space is intelligent and has the ability to memorize,” says Fadinger. “ So when European architecture was brought to Goa and new structures were built, these spaces memorized their formation and then went on looking for a new structures and abstract forms, exploring higher dimensions, changing their state of matter and its density. But they still carried the information from the previous architectural style with the mission to infect the new space.”
Fadinger compares this process that these architectural beings undertake to human beings need to explore themselves. “ When we are born, our parents looks after us, give us good values etc. But as we grow older, we want to get out and find ourselves and our own structures. This process too is similar,” he says. In his second sculpture for the exhibition, Fadinger, explores how Goan architecture came to have both European and Indian influences. “ When European architecture was brought to Goa, the engineers came with their own architecture plans. However, without their own workers, they had to explain these plans to the locals. The locals however took what they liked from these plans and added their own things to the mix. To demonstrate this I have shown a blackboard with plans drawn on them which is in pieces,” says Fadinger, adding that the idea for this series of expanding structures was a growing process that began about two years ago. “ I have been working on similar ideas for the last couple of years and as these have progressed there have been changes in the formation. For instance, earlier I needed a surface to rest the sculptures, now they are levitating,” says the artist who came to Goa about seven years ago and currently lives in Arambol.
