Cut-outs
2007–2013
acrylic on wooden cutout
acrylic on wooden cutout
Besides painting and drawing, cutouts play an important role in Rajkamal Kahlon’s oeuvre. Cutouts are a form of seventeenth-century trompe l’oeil painting that originated in the Netherlands. They were fashionable among English and American elites and began to wane in popularity by the late 1800s. Also known as dummy boards, picture boards, or silent companions, these life-sized forms were cut out of flat pieces of wood and painted to look like animals, children, servants, and soldiers. They were used as elements of interior decor, to animate an otherwise lackluster room, as a home-security measure meant to scare off prospective thieves, as a fireplace accessory to keep the heat out during summers, and as quiet company for the lonesome. Kahlon’s interest in dummy boards grew from a desire to push beyond the parameters of traditional painting formats and to produce more ambitious works that could physically confront viewers. Starting with photographs of colonial subjects, the artist began to create life-sized, photo-realistic cutouts as a way to make sense of the picture plane and to symbolically take apart history. Kahlon has employed this mode of painting for over twenty years and refers to a subset of cutouts as BLOWBACK. The term “blowback” describes potentially dangerous and undesirable behaviors of explosions; it is also used by the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) when referencing secret operations in foreign nations that go awry and attract unwanted political attention. Kahlon borrows the notion of blowback to explore the relationship between former colonial subjects exploited by early anthropologists and their modern-day descendants, often labeled as terrorists, who use violence as a way to gain attention and power.