Manoj Arora brings forth the substance and quintessence of Sunder Nursery in his photographs, says Uma Nair
Sunder Nursery’s botanical beauty captures the minds and hearts of those who visit it to find their contemplative moments. In his quest for form, Manoj Arora seeks to unveil a certain elegiac moment of the simple veined vitality of a leaf in a monochromatic mooring of still life.
Arora’s images create a well defined photographic aesthetic in which we glimpse an unravelling of a profound beauty of time in the prism of architectural ardour. In the shades and shadows of Delhi’s monuments, caught in a time warp of history and memory, he gives us a meditation of form and nature. The Humayun’s Tomb serves as an architectural backdrop with vignettes of the past weaving into the nuggets of present-day shadows, corners and crevices. The arched doorway and the stairs present their sonata into a symphony that has lyrical cadences. Colour is his vehicle as much as the luminosity of the moment. Arora has a prism of deeper understanding as he goes beyond to capture, within the mosaic of stone and light, Delhi’s architectural monumentality in the limpid pools of luminosity.
Within this search, we see an inherent abstraction that is laced with the imagery of an incandescent insignia of an abstract medley. Colour is his ally; it is the vehicle that drives his desire to hone a sumptuous aesthetic. Between Lodhi Garden and Humayun’s Tomb, his odyssey is one of resonance in rhythmic realms. In the niches of Delhi’s monuments, he encounters a countenance of strong light, hard edges and compelling contrasts. Influenced by the simplicity of Mughal art and the intricate carving of latticework on stone, he seems to revel in the magic of the pure form of things.
“The camera should be used for a recording of life, for rendering the very substance and quintessence of the thing itself,” said the great modernist Edward Weston. Arora brings alive those words in these six works. To move from the classic to the contemporary, through force of spirit and originality of style, he embraces something rarer, an instinctive minimal classicist with a magical gift for visual rhythm. He makes something insignificant — like an elegant frieze frame — a symbolic statement of the tapestry of time.