A 'social' man and the canvas
26 May 2012 2:21 AM GMT
Manu Parekh's journey embodies the itinerant sailor's trail along the vast expanse of land and sea. Standing in the throes of acute artistic crisis, Parekh set sail along the Ganges in Benaras and observed the vastly characteristic and thriving local and private rituals in practice along the ghats of Benares. This ancient city held up a panoramic view of life and from several perspectives.
This vision stuck with him. It presented itself as the dominant motif through most of his works, creating a sense of visual coherence and artistic intensity. It allowed him to envisage a novel concept of modernity, almost sacrosanct, yet in perfect harmony and rhythmic tandem with the prolific vivacity of everyday life in the city.
He engages his dialectic with a sense of vernacular religiosity and spirituality from the perspective of Benares as a city that has effectively shaped the subjectivity of many modern artists in the twentieth century.
Art Alive Gallery recently brought the works of this eminent artist to the city after a sabbatical of close to six years. Manu's works are imbued with a concern for man's social being, with elements of strong eroticism pervading through the metamorphic forms and symbols within the greater corpus of his paintings.
The sexuality of the fecund forms, the forward thrusting phallic shapes, surreal landscapes of fleshy forms — animals, humans and plants, growing into and out of one another — dominate the canvas. His style has gradually crystallised, metaphorically as well as literally. It is neither surreal, nor cubist, neither abstract, it is in fact, an eclectic mix of all these elements in a far more subjective way than we can imagine. The works reveal a structural aim to capture a plastic reality.
The body of work from the 70s is marked by a stark and depressive gloom and sinister apprehensions, which morphed over the years to a long series of paintings with rather oppressive sexual symbolism.
His later paintings primarily focus on the degradation of man and the scourge of this brutalised existence that torments him. Spread out over four sections, the first part is called Glimpses from a Boat and comprises the 'virtuoso modernist landscape of Benares'.
The rich textures works depict the artist's experience of both virginal as well as the corrupted beauty of Benares. The intrigues of light and shadow are captured effortlessly in this particular section.
The second part of the show is titled Transformed Stone and celebrates the religious effervescence of the vastly diverse practises in the city. The consecrated notions of the divine, the force of the belief, and the extent of the ritualistic paraphernalia are captured in this section. Manu's works render these religious observations sacred and elevated on one hand and domesticated and familiar on the other.
The artist is not alien to the idea of repetition. The continued visitations of recurrent tropes and themes form a larger image with a single dominant motif that is effective in giving shape to the original vision. The third section showcases 'the concept of repetition, a process which has long fascinated Parekh, to arrive at something profound about making art and revisiting familiar visual tropes and places over an extended period of time.'
Repetition holds the possibility of creating and recreating newer impressions through revisited sights, sounds, thoughts and ideas, without forging an alienation from the familiar.
The final section has been titled Flowers and essentially embarks upon a journey to the interior of the selfhood of the individual. As symbols of the sacred and the sexual and as objects of still life, flowers transform and metamorph into the human form, almost anticipating the close existence of these two elements of nature, and this contemplation forges an intimate embodiment of the self.
The exhibition exemplifies a journey from the exterior to the interior similar in approach to the modernist artists' exploration of the self and the other vis-a-vis his own subjectivity and the objective paradigms of the world around him.
This vision stuck with him. It presented itself as the dominant motif through most of his works, creating a sense of visual coherence and artistic intensity. It allowed him to envisage a novel concept of modernity, almost sacrosanct, yet in perfect harmony and rhythmic tandem with the prolific vivacity of everyday life in the city.
He engages his dialectic with a sense of vernacular religiosity and spirituality from the perspective of Benares as a city that has effectively shaped the subjectivity of many modern artists in the twentieth century.
Art Alive Gallery recently brought the works of this eminent artist to the city after a sabbatical of close to six years. Manu's works are imbued with a concern for man's social being, with elements of strong eroticism pervading through the metamorphic forms and symbols within the greater corpus of his paintings.
The sexuality of the fecund forms, the forward thrusting phallic shapes, surreal landscapes of fleshy forms — animals, humans and plants, growing into and out of one another — dominate the canvas. His style has gradually crystallised, metaphorically as well as literally. It is neither surreal, nor cubist, neither abstract, it is in fact, an eclectic mix of all these elements in a far more subjective way than we can imagine. The works reveal a structural aim to capture a plastic reality.
The body of work from the 70s is marked by a stark and depressive gloom and sinister apprehensions, which morphed over the years to a long series of paintings with rather oppressive sexual symbolism.
His later paintings primarily focus on the degradation of man and the scourge of this brutalised existence that torments him. Spread out over four sections, the first part is called Glimpses from a Boat and comprises the 'virtuoso modernist landscape of Benares'.
The rich textures works depict the artist's experience of both virginal as well as the corrupted beauty of Benares. The intrigues of light and shadow are captured effortlessly in this particular section.
The second part of the show is titled Transformed Stone and celebrates the religious effervescence of the vastly diverse practises in the city. The consecrated notions of the divine, the force of the belief, and the extent of the ritualistic paraphernalia are captured in this section. Manu's works render these religious observations sacred and elevated on one hand and domesticated and familiar on the other.
The artist is not alien to the idea of repetition. The continued visitations of recurrent tropes and themes form a larger image with a single dominant motif that is effective in giving shape to the original vision. The third section showcases 'the concept of repetition, a process which has long fascinated Parekh, to arrive at something profound about making art and revisiting familiar visual tropes and places over an extended period of time.'
Repetition holds the possibility of creating and recreating newer impressions through revisited sights, sounds, thoughts and ideas, without forging an alienation from the familiar.
The final section has been titled Flowers and essentially embarks upon a journey to the interior of the selfhood of the individual. As symbols of the sacred and the sexual and as objects of still life, flowers transform and metamorph into the human form, almost anticipating the close existence of these two elements of nature, and this contemplation forges an intimate embodiment of the self.
The exhibition exemplifies a journey from the exterior to the interior similar in approach to the modernist artists' exploration of the self and the other vis-a-vis his own subjectivity and the objective paradigms of the world around him.
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