The Mysterious Woman:
the images of ancient temples

At first glance many of the paintings in this exhibition appear simplistic, naïve even, in their line and structure, and in the bold use of colour. However, to dismiss the images in this way is to do them, and the artist, an injustice.

So too is it unfair, as some have done, to criticise Rajavelu’s work as explicitly erotic, a charge he neither defends nor disowns. The criticism implies that there is something wrong with the erotic, when in fact the erotic exists everywhere in nature and in life. As the artist states: “I’m in love with life”. Rajavelu has, as have generations of artists before him, taken the mystery of the feminine, the eternal woman, as his symbol of both the erotic and life.

It is this that we need to consider when we look at the work, and accept it on those terms.

The mysterious aspect of woman is explored through her voluptuousness, her open, welcoming stance. It is through her sexuality and receptiveness that she both entices and threatens. She opens her arms to receive, but at the same time she looks away, her eyes never meet those of the onlooker. She both accepts and rejects – she is as contradictory as life.

Her juxtaposition to an animal, most often a horse, serves to enhance and highlight that contradiction. The horse, considered the noblest of beasts, a symbol of civilisation, the masculine, acts as a foil to the primitive nature of the mysterious woman. She has turned the world upside down. Animal becomes civilisation, human becomes nature.

And before anyone points the finger and makes accusations of the debasement of woman by reducing her to raw nature, consider this! Great civilisations have risen and eventually they fall. Nature engulfs them and their manuscripts and monuments, those great marks of civilisation are eaten up and destroyed by time – nature’s greatest ally.

What remains? The promise of something new; the enticing, welcoming smile of the mysterious woman!

Dr. Sian E. Jay