Baiju Parthan's painting ‘Symbolic Logic’ is a visual meditation on the eternal human quest to decode reality through systems of meaning. Drawing from the artist's deep engagement with Jungian psychology, shamanism, and computational technology, this work maps the uncanny parallels between alchemy's mystical apparatus and Boolean logic's binary certainties. Both systems aim to distill the universe into comprehensible elements: the alchemists through their retorts, crucibles and elixirs, modern computation through its gates, switches, and algorithms. Each promises transformation of lead into gold, the gross into sublime, or sterile data into intelligence and consciousness. The laboratory vessels and apparatus that populate the canvas are hybrid forms, simultaneously scientific instruments and ritual objects, suggesting that our technological pursuits remain fundamentally alchemical. The geometric precision of these forms are reminiscent of the logical operators that actualize all digital processing and contrasts with the organic, biomorphic elements that surge through and around them. These undulating, living shapes represent the unconscious, the intuitive, the aspects of existence that resist categorization. The painting occupies that shifting, dissolving boundary where matter meets
meaning, where the physical apparatus of transformation, whether medieval or digital confronts the metaphysical questions that remain constant across centuries of human existence.