Arun Pandit, through his sculptures, shows mirror images of bulls and humans emerging out of a cocoon, says Uma Nair

Arun Pandit, Lalit Kala National Award winner for sculpture in 2010, could well have been overlooked at the ICCR gallery in Kolkata. He is one of the great discoveries of the curator/collector Amal Allana who found him after a long journey of struggles.

Pandit’s bronze sculptures have taken on the look of granite and rock rather than metal. Asserting strongly the three dimensionality of his figures, Pandit, through his sculptures, shows bulls and humans emerging out of the cast, as if from a cocoon. He creates repeated mirror images and multiple reflections of the same figures.

Elegiac elegance

Resonance in Time has a series of quaint sculptures by Pandit that echo the elegiac elegance of his thoughts, the brilliance of his conception and compositions that keep man at the centre of his universe. “I found that he had poetry, spirituality, irony and humour in his works,” says Allana, the daughter of the connoisseur Ebrahim Alkazi who set up Art Heritage many moons ago.

Allana discovered Pandit at the solo show Power and Pathos at the Lalit Kala Akademi in 2016. Pandit’s bronze and fibre glass sculptures talk to us about the power of man as much as the uniqueness of creating an alchemy of realist as well as cubist elements to bring forth a synergy that is at once unique and deeply resonant in its rhythms. It evocatively echoes our own thoughts.

Half world, half material

Nationally known to Tirupathi devotees for his Garuda installation, Pandit considers Picasso, Moore and Brancusi as his role models. Today, in our country, Pandit is the only one who creates an amalgam of mould and bronze casting in his sculptures to give it a rare half world, half material chemistry that showcase life’s leanings as much as it reflects the inner deeper instincts of man’s many dichotomies. His Couples point to the resilience and beauty of the institution of marriage. His Musicians is a work that brings forth the cubist brilliance of angularities and the magic of antiquity in vintage realism.

Tensile tenors

Pandit works with bronze to create his own islands of reflection “to see how much continuity and depth there is in one single material.” In many other works, I saw the split mirror images of a single face which add poise to the idea of repetition and multiplication in a techno-crazy age. Each sculpture becomes a project on its own. Pass your eyes over this brilliantly designed and installed show and you’ll see that it’s not just bronze but each element which fights silently for dominance. In his works, Pandit is more interested in continuity and conversations that the viewer can interpret as he tries to do something different with each composition — having a different response to each facet.

Ways of seeing

“Not all of my sculptures are beautiful. Many are challenging and awkward — the viewer has to move around to find the moments or facets of the gestures I use. But once you decide how to look at something, you can apply that to everything,” said he.

Pandit’s interest in ways of seeing things stems from his childhood in Patna where he studied the creative practices of life and the architectural symbolism of housing as well as observed people. Known for having created public works in the city these sculptures tell us that a thought is a physical thing which is subtle but at the same time very real in this world. We understand that there’s an intellectual as well as an aesthetic dimension to that.

The beauty of Pandit’s sculptures is his passionate sense of perfection not just in his figurative creations but the tinge of spirituality that he weaves into his work. There is an amalgamation of different moods, myriad responses and reflective contemplation.

All the world’s a stage

This is perhaps a rare brand of syncretism. It has its own melancholic quietude. It amalgamates spirituality and illusionism, pervading every aspect of his work. “When you put something on a pedestal, you’re saying that we can play with the idea of space and different dimensions that change over passage of time. When you change the position of the pedestal, it’s like you’re bringing back a perspective of your own idea of reality. Ultimately, its all in our minds. And the most important thing is that we create works that give us a certain identity. Sculpture, for me, is about creating my own language within the beauty of the gravity of bronze. And the human figure is my elixir. It is the substance on which I contemplate the contexts of life’s hidden drama as all the world’s a stage.”

(Resonance in Time opens tomorrow at Art Heritage, Triveni, and is on till January 4.)