Spiral-inspired art

Vishal Joshi's solo exhibition titled 'Contours', curated by Uma Nair and managed by Nipun Soin will be held from October 26-31 at Visual Arts Gallery, Indian Habitat Centre. The exhibition, which will showcase the artist's paintings and wooden montages, is about the eternal power of the spiral that sustains the human spirit in all walks of life specifically in the journey that is akin to a spiritual sojourn.

The subject of the landscape is central to the art of Joshi but it blends calligraphy and small indentations that seek to explore deeper intensities. The spiral form is the life-blood of his art and it courses through all the that he creates.

The man-made small contours that he drives onto the blank layered canvasses look more like calcified notations, even as they exhibit his concern for death and destruction and the living being. The two sides of the moving spirit are represented in living, breathing expanses of works fashioned into ergonomic forms, and blackened, cosmic shapes onto which autumnal gold patterns and meanings are articulated in spiral spikes.

Curator Uma Nair who discovered his work three years ago says: "His works in burnt wood reflect the Yin and Yang components of human journeys.

Joshi works through materials in order to articulate his formal sculptural language and he cooperates with nature, and has done so since his early experiments with design and sculptural works , in order to gain inspiration for his narrative. The natural world, and by implication the cosmos, which controls the behaviour of nature, can now be seen as two parts of a greater whole."

The canvasses divided into upper and lower zones with texturing and calligraphic scripts are born of a harmony that exists within seeming disunity and which is a central spiritual precept, is also crucial to an understanding of the

intention of the art in this exhibition.