Review

"Pre-Presence 3," Acrylic on Canvas.

Keshav Ramaswami
Objects + Presence

Noon-6 p.m.

Lawrence Percolator
913 Rhode Island Street
(Behind Lawrence Arts Center)
Lawrence, Kansas
785.760.2764

Hours: Noon-6 p.m. Saturday and Sunday, by appointment other days.
Runs through: March 7

Gallery site: http://www.lcava.org

The label "Renaissance Man" gets tossed around pretty lightly these days. There's no other tag, though, that can be applied to Keshav Ramaswami.

He's an artist, a musician and a promising young scientist who already has earned international recognition. He even has a minor planet named for him: 23850 Ramaswami, found in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.

Once he graduates high school, who knows what else he'll be able to accomplish?

That's no typo: Ramaswami, whose show Objects + Presence runs through March 7 at the Lawrence Percolator, is 16 years old and a junior at Shawnee Mission East. He has been painting since he was 10, and while still a student at Mission Valley Middle School was a 2007 finalist in the Discovery Channel's Young Scientist Challenge (which led to the asteroid being named for him).

In short, he's no dabbler ... and his art shows it.

Objects + Presence is made up of five separate collections of acrylic paintings, some dating back to 2008. True to the show's name, the collections fall into two main categories, further divided into "Pre-Objects," "Objects," "Post-Objects", "Pre-Presence" (which includes Pre-Presence 3, today's featured image) and "Presence." Ramaswami is currently working on a sixth line, "Post-Presence," to complete the entire series.

The paintings, which recalls works by Joan Miro, Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky (all of whom Ramaswami cites as influences), vary between stark, sleek geometry and images that, while  less "regular," are no less carefully executed and arranged.

From the show catalog:

Painted between mid-2008 to early 2010, the two series, "Objects + Presence" explores the formalistic aspects of composition. "Objects" is an aconceptual series that explores placement, color, texture, and size of forms that includes a tapered figure, a circle, and a diaphanous line. "Presence" is a series of works composed of arrows, definite rectangles, indefinite quadrilaterals, faded textures and free-form circles. The use of color-textured and dark backgrounds were a basis to thoroughly express the sometimes bold, and other times faint foreground.

That spirit of exploration, in both the arts and the sciences, is what makes Ramaswami truly deserving of the "Renaissance Man" label. Where he is now isn't where he has been, nor is it where he will be ... but in the case of Objects + Presence, the present is a good-looking place to be.

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