Five artists explore an individual’s relationship with the earth through evocative landscapes that could take one to distant lands and speak of unknown encounters, says Uma Nair
The reason why landscapes hold our attention is their power to maintain a concentrated human gaze as well as tell a story and let your imagination do the rest. Exploring the beauty and tenacity of the earth and the evergreen terrain of landscapes, Palette Art Gallery’s Songs of Soil gives credence to five South Indian artists. The power and intensity of a landscape in their art is an attempt to reconstruct a more universal approach to notions of identity, society, refuge, and utopia.
Enchanting islands
These five artists, who align themselves along the Southern shores, give us various worlds that mingle vibrantly in the landscapes from diverse parts, forming both recognisable and distant realms, with an enchanting mixture of culture-specific properties.
These works evoke and question, rather than pinpoint the place of any discernible narrative structure. Then, artists who recreate landscapes in its finely-detailed cadences typically isolate specific moments to represent larger, more complex sequence of events over a passage of time. The countryside or the hamlet, then, becomes the location of both possibility and displacement, where these artists visualise narrative contexts.
Nagesh’s sacredness
Artist Nagesh’s Echoes Behind the Pines lends his work a pervading sense of sacredness, of nature and its lived idioms as well as loss in the rhythms of nature’s beings. Within its very nuances, we get a sombre view of natural history and an individual’s relationship with it.
Pradeep’s poetics
Artist Pradeep captures poetic works, memorialises events and elements through symbolic abstraction. His craft, imbued with a miniature lineage, relies upon the well-worn objects of human use and the traces left by the everyday idioms of existence evoking burdened emotions that lie beyond the easily-parsed dates and facts of the past. Intricate moods and moorings revel in the coming together of lithe lines.
Sumesh’s lush tropicana
Artist Sumesh’s lush tropicana-filled green environs recreate the vistas of memory and forgetfulness, presence and absence as he mediates on what history and reality that has been left behind. The elephant’s trap is as vital as the presence of the elephant; his ability to tie the act of memory to the finely-nuanced paradisal pastoral in Kerala’s succulent evergreen forests gives us a glimpse of the power of nurturing that weaves into the personal narrative.
Sanam’s realms
Artist Sanam Narayanan’s lithe and dulcet handling of the Untitled works embody his method of capturing the haunting aspects of the past. The artist reframes them to highlight the contrast of the realms of reality and memory. The soft and tranquil landscape reflects a location of such incomprehensible quietude that the viewer sees the sentinel-like beauty of plants and trees and a lone mound that creates a perfect paradisal postcard.
Umesh’s surreal stance
Hailing from Kerala, artist Umesh’s surreal stance is seen in his embracing lush tropicana with dense forests. We also see a recurring visual language, that was instilled into him in his childhood, from nurturing as well as voracious reading habits. The brilliance of the metaphor surges as you look at the narrative of a story within, where the frog looking at the crescent moon transports us to distant lands and speaks of unknown encounters. There is in the storyline the inter-connectedness of all entities in the universe. A blade of grass on the earth is in kinship with a stellar body in distant space, thus the universe itself echoes rhythms that balance both man and nature.
Tropical atmospherics
In the five artists, who present landscapes, we envision a world where surfaces breathe and expand, even as we, urban dwellers enter into the implications of nature’s moorings in the atmospherics of mist and shadow.
These artists explore the individual’s relationship to the earth through the evocative use of landscape elements that are rustic and resonant. The irresistible fascination of these works lie somewhere between high imagination, deepened observations and the presence and power of psychological states of being as they unveil like songs of the soil.
(The show is on display till end of April.)