136th Show sponsored by Artchill at JUNEJA ART GALLERY .
Ganga Singh's latest paintings offer us a glimpse into inner landscapes of another world. In these dreamlike scenes, cohabited by animals and people, strange interactions occur that question the traditional logic and expectations of viewing. The bold abundance of vivid color in his new paintings call for viewers delectation of beautiful patterns, which is his signature pictorial element. His depictions are always stylized from his own imagination, memory and dreams alike.
Art, since prehistoric times, has influenced man. Art can speak where words fail. Nature offers us pictorial and aesthetic beauty as images and ideas. Artist Ganga Singh adds to it -elements of abstraction, distortion and simplification to create an alternative world and life where the physical and mystical co-inhabit. ‘My paintings are based on my response to nature. They are modern designs with a strong primitive and tribal influence. Symmetry plays an important role in my painting with powerful and simplified forms.’ ‘Imagination is the most enjoyable faculty man has. It is God’s gift to man. I believe this imagination provokes him to create and make life worthwhile. Most people ignore their imaginative thoughts. They are too busy in meeting their day to day requirements. I watch my thoughts carefully. They are continuous, without any gap. They take you away from misery….they make you happy ’ says the artist. Most of the time one feels one’s thoughts are wild dreams, un-reasonable, foolish, as they are absurd. But this is the beauty of thoughts. They recreate combinations, take new form, give birth to new dimensions, and create parallel reality. They balance our existence. Ganga uses forms associated with our day to day life to tell stories through his paintings. Philosophy, he feels is equally important. Everything, whether it is living man or animal or non-living: all are equal and have emotions like us. They also act & react the same way as humans. Animals, trees and other animated forms in his work have human faces. ‘I give animal like faces to human beings to show their animal instinct, which dominates their behavior in today`s world.. I have made an effort to portray the deep and hidden emotions that we experience. The purity of colors and forms are very evident which depicts the relationship of body and soul. ‘ In his artistic pursuit he gives importance to his creative expression along with the material and mode he employs. While each material has its limitation in application, he strives to get the maximum out of it, at times even deviating from set procedures and use methods that are not in time with orthodox approach.
Found objects from trash have for generations
sparked the imagination of the artist. If nothing else then at least the idea
of it. This is always reinforced with a title. There is also, some degree of
alteration, modification by the artist, to create his own touch, values and
political thought. This method is now being critically discussed, as any object
taken from its real ‘purpose’ including ‘ready-mades’, constitutes modification
of the object because it changes our perception of the utility and purpose of
the same. This is exactly what Kishan Meena’s work tries to do.
Artists from India & round the world have dealt with the
subject of trash, waste water and other such general daily refuse that man
creates, over and over again, in abundance and without much thought. Trash
objects have been picked up and relocated in art galleries for a few
decades. One of the main objectives of the artist who picks out objects
from trash heaps is to rearrange them to make a profound statement and give a
new meaning.
Kishan Meena’s work is unique because he has not
gone through heaps of trash and rearranged the objects as his eye has
remained on flowing waste water in a small polluted river round the
corner from where he lives. He has photographed flowing water with toxic waste
and debris, stopping it just for the moment when it turns into an abstract
visual. Unlike a trash artist he has not picked up anything, nor re arranged it
to suit his vision, he has simply shown ‘what it is’. The only manipulation he
has done is to mirror the images, and with that, like a magic wand has turned
them it into intricate abstract images, almost unrecognizable from what they
actually are. Even if critically examined, if not told what the images are
about it is difficult to imagine the original source of them.
What is interesting about Kishan Meena’s ‘art’ is
that he has taken a flow of extremely toxic waste water and frozen it in time.
Unlike many, Meena has not titled any works and leaves them to the imagination
of the viewer. One of the images, which has dry stems of grass sticking out,
reminds one that nothing lives in this water. With his own humble eye he has
made a political statement about life around his own living area showing from
such minute detail where the world is going if we do not become more
responsible. All the images are photographs, and disturbingly beautiful.
Contemporary readers, viewers and interlocutors are manifestly more willing than their counterparts thirty years ago to appreciate works that resist tightly defined analytical categories. Films with ambiguous characters, books with unsettled protagonists and plays with unstable trajectory have over the last decades attracted greater popular acceptance. Indeed, there has been a correspondence between greater understanding of the inescapability of ethical ambivalence and popular accommodation of grey as a tolerable idea. It would not be an overstatement anymore to claim that these days grey, or analogous conceptual horizons such as ambivalence or un-equivocation is no longer considered a negative attribute.
Artchill is delighted to showcase & unravel the abysmal depths of these Inscrutable Layers of latest works by these well known Indian artists- Shahid Parwez, Vijender Sharma, Ashish Shringi & Asit Kumar Patnaik.
SHAHID PARVEZ - Shahid has a unique style all of his own which has very little influence from others and makes his work very recognizably his. In much the same way that life is given to us in multiple layers, in his new works Shahid gives us paintings with increasingly complex and interlinked levels. His works present us with a series of simple overt images. However underlying that first level is a series of much more complex, intricate and interesting covert images and levels in multiple colored registrations creating surfaces of incredible richness and extravagance.
ASHISH SHRINGI - Ashish's body of works in the last two decades has remained inspired by the Tantrik symbolism and traditional art forms of Rajasthan, thus the essence of his art always bears the fragrance of nativity. In his paintings he has widely used Tantrik Yantras and symbols contextualizing them with his personal experiences of human relationships. The freshness of his colors and textures creates vivid hues. His compositions are highly complex, multidimensional and inter-weaved with multiple perspectives. The feeling of serenity, love, romance, satisfaction, compassion and passion are the soul of his works. The originality of his ideas and style holds our mind to reflect on meaning of life. His works are celebration of human thoughts and emotions. To conclude one may say that the identity and purity of his works will always showcase the ethos of this land.
ASIT KUMAR PATNAIK - An equivocation that is particularly alluring about Asit Patnaik’s men and women is the tension between the wide variety in their juxtaposition and their unchanging physical features. In their microcosmic expansiveness, they can alternatively convey impressions of joy, sorrow, love, indifference, familiarity as well as inscrutability. They relive potentialities, they entail pensive pasts, they call up imagined futures and they even interrogate their own selves and suppositions. Patnaik has been working on the Relations series for quite some time now. It will be interesting, therefore, to explore the kind of selves articulated into the batch of works on the Relations series.
VIJENDER SHARMA - His mind-boggling works speak and walk the viewer into its story, speaking of the inner and outer worlds. It could be satirical, esoteric, psychological, innocent, spiritual, dreamy or surrealistic...many such deeper emotions that we could relate or connect with. A contemporary artist, yet realistic in his own way, his paintings speak volumes of his own search in life as also his understanding of the unknown. Vijender seems to be a melancholic modernist who creates works that fool the eye and have an added edge of surreal dimensions. His paintings, many of them are not muted in color, but they are bold and powerful and always carrying a story to narrate. The textures that he adds to each canvas echo the trials and tribulations of observations he ponders over in the everyday idiom of lifestyles and living.
Text compiled by Sangeeta Juneja from various articles written by Anirban Bandyopadhyay , Madan Meena , Uma Nair , Malcolm Grant, Geoffrey Mason & Shail Choyal.
Ganga Singh's latest paintings offer us a glimpse into inner landscapes of another world. In these dreamlike scenes, cohabited by animals and people, strange interactions occur that question the traditional logic and expectations of viewing. The bold abundance of vivid color in his new paintings call for viewers delectation of beautiful patterns, which is his signature pictorial element. His depictions are always stylized from his own imagination, memory and dreams alike.
