Through metaphysical imagery, dripping colour and an array of symbolism, My Summer Garden aims to resurrect harmony and hope. By Uma Nair

There is a certain energy that invites and engages all art lovers who walk into Anu Bajaj’s Art Positive gallery. Nothing like a summer morning when the lanes are empty to walk in and look at a fresh take on the world around us by a group of artists. Critic and curator’s Georgina Maddox’s My Summer Garden embodies a mix of paintings and sculptures.

Elanchezhiyan Pichaikannu

Right in front and imposing as well as elegant in composition and oxidation, the patina of green Pichaikannu’s tree with Jallikattu bulls is the ‘pièce de résistance’ of the show. Here is a veritable master as a sculptor. His understanding and virtuosity of playing with form and moulding it to an abstracted perfection is indeed something both valuable and vintage. The beauty of his work brings in the harmony of different elements of nature as well as the authority of the tenets of creating forms born of the deeper rhythms of the earth.

Gogi Saroj Pal

Gogi Saroj Pal’s little nayikas go back to nearly 60 years. They frolic and endure in the fervour of feminine fables. Gogi’s brush strokes have about them a piquant panache, rendering themselves in the depth of the colourative chasms of tonalities. She has always had verve and vivacity in the manner in which her nayikas preen, peer or float about in a sea of emotions. Gogi’s women are born of literature, mythology and remind us of the little kinnaris from ancient lore. Her colours are warm and inviting, having about them a certain echo of the past and the present.

George Martin

Lithe and light, George Martin’s works light up the gallery for their luminous tints created in his mastery of minimalist modes to create maximum impact. They possess an insight when speaking about life, by reflecting back to his memories, small events or moments that help in understanding or interpreting the present. Martin insists that this is an open-ended effort and one is totally free to look at his artworks from different or maybe original perspectives.

He plays with an ensemble of images to convey  fundamental ideas, he also invites viewers to glance, gleam and enjoy multiple reactions and interpretations from the multiple mappings of thoughts he presents us with. His world is highly receptive and resonant and is an amalgam of  his love for films, literature and memories.

Biswajit Panda

The Odisha-born artist recently described his works as “cathartic cleansing, a power house of positive energy that has culled itself out of vicissitudes and trying times.” At Art Positive, his circular earth-shaped canvases have a charming energy that recall the beauty and balance of  a cosmic dance, in an interplay of dynamic and spiritual energy flows, reflecting eternal life forces. Panda plays with the brilliance of abstract as well as figurative forms to create corollaries in his cosmic oeuvre.

His circular charcoal grey canvasses echo endless nights, his streaks of red, brown and silver trace their own path like a conscious cascade that breaks the monotony of the charcoal. Panda plays with metaphysical imageries, within the profusion of dripping colours and the flight of butterflies, who symbolise hope, change and resurrection in the Christian theology. He also gives us an array of symbolisms that actually are deeply rooted in the entire cosmos of the creativity of man and nature. Impressionable and full of a stirring impact are his works that make them a perfect choice by Maddox.

Seema Kohli

The largest work in the show belongs to artist Seema Kohli. It reflects the panorama of feminine subjectivities. She alters the  concept of feminine sexuality with a deepened tenor of spiritual essence and ethos. She extols the balance and beauty of physical attributes, with a profound arc of intellect, thoughts, dreams and realities,  all woven into the paradigms of patterns that are born of the womb and of the earth.

She engages, studies and recreates the power and the deeper intensities of the Hiranyagarbha, that has evolved from one of the mantras of the Yajur Veda. It reflects the quiet and subtle beauty of constant procreation. The feminine spirit and the form are itself  a prayer to the eternal self — a sojourn  of deeper tenets of meditation. Her composition echoes the dynamics and design of the spiritual but it is by no means  religious, and yet it explores  a poetically elegant and richly sensual female form.

Kohli’s work is symbolic of the progress and recycling of thought processes in the human mind, portrayed as calm, evolved and serene, both in palette and poise. If this large canvas is a gesture of the divine, a prayer to the eternal self, then being in the Garden of Flowers itself is elevating.