INFINITE DEVIATIONS : YOGESH RAI
November 11 - December 27 , 2025
“The abstraction, the dream, are as limited for me as the concrete and the real. What to do?
Show a part of it only, in a narrow mirror, as if it were the whole?”
— Claude Cahun
Hands clasped together
become the rise
and fall of sleeping chests,
become a home for fears of loneliness, become the insatiable thirst
of the ocean for its coast, become
the umbilicals by which we belong to the whole. Intimacy, in its shifting shapes, is inextricable from our existence as beings of this world. An unmasked smile, a leaning torso, a high pitched hello are all natural signs of these burgeoning connections—are tell-tale signs we learn to fervently hide when our yearnings are adjudged as deviant by social code. In an alchemy of slippages between light and shadow, between unruly affection and communal acceptance, Yogesh Rai creates an ode to all who believe in love outside of mores.
Rai’s visual lexicon of tessellated bodyscapes conjured in graphite, of limbs and digits stacked infinitely, emerges from tender reflection on the experience of growing into his sexuality. Raised outside of big cities in Jhansi, Uttar Pradesh, he was subject to strict norms much before he had the language to understand them. The silence, the shame, and the insistence of desire inextricable from coming of age find strong evocations in his work. Space for exploration opened up two decades, significantly deepening when the artist moved to study at MSU Baroda. There he found critically like-minded peers alongside whom he could begin unlearning the lessons a body is made to obey before it can even know itself.
In Rai’s tight corporeal frames we see the omniscient enforcement of what Judith Butler has called the 'regulation' of gender. Walk like a man, don’t move your hands! Expanding from his own negotiations with shame, the skillful drawings probe the ways in which these constraints affect us all, holding our bodies in check. Who can sit expectantly, and who must bring the plates? Who can sprawl with certainty, and who must watch their space? A fence of knees and shins in Dot the i’s marks these historically drawn binary lines. Luminous joints narrate the peculiar gendering of crossed legs: a decent woman must never spread her legs, but a man is not a man anymore if he crosses his. In the folds and curves where the dualities bend, ever so meticulously the work raises an eye to ask, what happens if I choose to defy?
The grid entered painting with a promise of clarity, a rationalist promise to separate feeling and form, but its history is undoubtedly one of Cartesian control. Rosalind Krauss once called it modern art’s will to silence, a structure that turned vision into discipline. Painters, photographers, graphic designers, architects are all beholden to it—even in the act of breaking it—a tether that parallels Michel Foucault's notion of normalization. Here, Rai self-reflexively critiques the ubiquitous aesthetic regime in the very act of emphasizing it. A close look at the work reveals the small differences that characterize the human hand, infinite deviations from the norm that make us who we are.
Symmetry and structure, most prominent in the interlocked grid of hands in Held in the Weave, cannot be reduced to rigidity; rather they call for reliance, for the longing to be embraced in a world that has continually misunderstood those at the periphery. The drawing holds its own weight the way bodies do when language fails them: through contact, through proximity. In the overlapping bonds of trust, new meanings are allowed to emerge, eyes wink a message across the room, knuckles—transforming into pearls—caress in reassurance. A small disobedience flowers inside obedience and refuses to apologise for the bloom.
I read Rai’s surrealist language in the lineage of French queer surrealists Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore. The duo worked adjacent to the French Surrealists in Paris during the interwar period of the 1920s-30s, deploying a wide range of formats spanning self-portraiture, photomontage, surrealist sculpture, writing, and performance. Cahun, who famously wrote “Masculine? Feminine? It depends on the situation. Neuter is the only gender that always suits me,” became one of the earliest voices to challenge binary constructions of gender and sexual identity. It is the photomontages that appeared in the book 'Aveux non Avenus' (Disavowals: Or, cancelled confessions, 1930), replete with disembodied hands and limbs that evoke a dynamic reminiscence, albeit composed through an arrangement that flows with different elasticity — contrasting the relative tolerance of 1920s Paris with the silences of a queer life outside metropolitan India.
Many works, most prominently More? with its avian reconstruction of fingers and thumbs, carry this legacy of corporeal satire. However, the young artist eschews confrontation — heavy in Cahun and Moore’s photomontages through the recurrent motif of the glaring eyeball, also found in the sculpture Object (1936) which features a tennis ball painted with a wide-open eye as its centerpiece. Rai is interested in humor, flirtation, and subtle intonation as a way to invite viewers into the dialogue rather than demand their attention through provocation. The restraint is not only a formal device but also an exercise of what Édouard Glissant has called the ‘right to opacity’: the agency to choose their field of visibility, which auto-narrative artists must negotiate in order to find a safe space between vulnerability and consumption. Without this agency, we are entrenched in extractivism. Rai finds that refuge in shadow, a zone in which he sees complexity living without spectacle. A space where uncertainty finds dignity, where emotions can stay valid even as they resist definition. His drawings let that half-light settle gently across the page, softening edges without erasing them. In the quiet grey of graphite, tenderness takes form: a hand that lingers rather than grips, a body outlined just enough to remain whole. His shadows hold and preserve the unnamed, they allow emotion to exist without forcing it into confession.
Through these choices Rai bestows his figures with a quiet autonomy. In String of Pearls we are in the company of figures who hold their own despite the landscape of misogyny and shame that prevails around them. Like the globular gleaming rejects of the oyster, produced around irritant particles, the elegance and strength of many of our bodies is gained by transforming the restraints that hold us in place. However, this fortitute—no doubt crucial to survive and thrive—comes at a cost: our ability to return to softness and interdependency that are keystones of a life lived in community.
To continually resist requires one to have a net in which to fall, more than one embrace in which to rest. Rai honours those who harbour him from the storms, especially his partner, in the almost life-sized yet intimate work, Bridges, the largest in this exhibition. For those of us who don’t find acceptance and affirmation in our natal families, our chosen families—pods of friends and lovers and siblings and mothers—are the ones that hold us when the world seems to fall apart. Two rows of torsos stand face to face, their hands extended upwards in the shape of shelter. These are networks that keep us stable even if one hand loses its grip, a strategy best learnt from the experience of crashing hard. In the body of works on view, survival tactic becomes style; weight distributes itself so no single spot unravels to breaking point.
Lovers, one of the more humorous pieces on view, when listened to closer, urges a change of orientation. An array of index and middle fingers playfully dance across its surface. Each pointer finger is bent over to meet its couple in joyful embrace; a symbol of union, sometimes sneaky, but also a common gesture of luck. Enacted herewith is what Sara Ahmed writes of as ‘slantwise’ orientations— those oblique routes walked by bodies that cannot or will not follow straight lines. Like the lovers of Rai’s drawing, we forge paths to journey the calling of our innermost light. Throughout history radicals persecuted for walking upon these oblique lines have opened up avenues for expansion, for freedom from edifices that seemed unyielding in their times.
Our reflections slip and slide across the surface of graphite, its responsiveness becoming a formal echo of these slant paths: calling for a gaze that views it from both face and fringe. The medium resists fixity; itself performing what the work speaks: a refusal to settle into singular meaning. The grid of Holes urgently oscillates with such duality. Hands join at their fingertips, appearing folded as if in prayer or reverence. However, their palms do not sit conjoined. In the shape created by the triad of tip, palm, and thumb there resides a space for matters of the heart. A viewer might feel confronted by the clash of tradition and individuality, but on sitting with this dialectic a little longer, what appears is an appeal to find communion between polarities. Rather than rupturing familial kinship over differences, can we together cultivate the grounds to step towards each other, to stand in alignment even when we don’t find understanding?
In this body of works, repetition becomes liturgical. Each stroke a learning to love the self, each blend a ritual reminder against the pressure to conform. In building this language of reconstructive repetition, Yogesh Rai pays homage to the quotidian detours and deviations that fortify life outside the normative. His works are strengthened by an auto-narrative density, an import that exudes from his own persistent introspection. Like the journey of clasped hands to nodes of belonging, these are slow steps, yet each opens way for the next. Shame does not vanish, but for Rai, it has lost its monopoly. Re-sutured, we are reminded of wholeness; not as before, rather, wrapped in its shadow, becoming anew.
— Shaunak Mahbubani
Assisted by Krrisha Gadkari
Images
Installation
Press
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