Five sterling works at Delhi Art Week

Delhi Art Week (DAW) is a new, independent and collaborative initiative by City’s leading contemporary Art Galleries that aims to bring together Private and Public art institutions to raise awareness, educate and focus attention on modern and contemporary art in New Delhi.

The aim is to inject fresh energy into the Art Scene in the capital. This Art- Focused week (3rd-10th April) will witness curated shows, talks and walkthroughs from 37 galleries and institutions in their own spaces in the city of New Delhi.

DAW aims to put visual arts in the forefront, and collectively create an awareness and love for the arts. The inaugural edition seeks to strengthen ties between art organizations, art lovers, and patrons by putting together an exciting calendar of art exhibitions, talks and walkthroughs over a sustained period of time.

Delhi Art Week will enhance, encourage and increase the synergy within the arts for public and art-loving audience in the capital. It aims to bring back audiences to the galleries and museums in the pandemic era. In an epic collective, 37 participating galleries; 4 institutions, including 2 museums with over 50 exhibitions featuring 250 artists will all come together.

The capital city of Delhi has been divided into 4 art zones, where one can find clusters of galleries and institutions listed in each Zone. Five best works in the DAW will bring into focus mediums materials and compositional candour.

Ghulam Rasool Santosh -Art Pilgrim

Art Pilgrim (Triveni) has a formidable collection-it has a work by Ghulam Rasool Santosh that speaks of history and Indianesque idioms in the richness of heritage. It belongs to 1987 and reflects the artist at his meditative best.

The abstract tantra master Santosh studied under Biren De and created works that spoke of the Purusha Prakriti principles. Santosh was an iconoclast who painted through his contemplative experiences that were both transformative and transcendental.Both resplendent Santosh works echo ecological principles and yogic ascendance.

Santosh’s paintings are widely acknowledged as prime examples of Neo-Tantrism, an artistic movement originated by the artist, K.C.S. Paniker in the 1960’s. Deeply inspired by Hindu, Buddhist and Jain concepts of dualities between male and female and between macro- and microcosm, Santosh’s paintings are the blend of abstraction with a representational imagery involving yantras, mandalas, chakras, and the lokapurusha (cosmic man).The human figure, the yogic poise and the weaving in of the sun in place of the human face is what makes these works heady and deeply contemplative in idiom.One must go back to Santosh’s own words:

Indian tradition is based on the universal concept of the ultimate reality manifesting itself in myriad shapes and forms in time and space. My own self is preoccupied with the same universal concept. My paintings are based on the male-and-female concept of Siva and Sakti and, therefore, construed as Tantra. It is not just the man and woman concept. Any semblances in my paintings in this respect is symbolical, but my stress is on the more fundamental male-female principle with its infinite connotation with all the pervasive light emanating from the objective reality. (Artist Statement, Obeisance to Sharika Santosh, exhibition catalogue, New Delhi, 1978)

Neeraj Goswami-Sanchit Art

Sanchit Art tucked away at City Walk Mall is another gallery that has a repertoire of Masters in their collection. Meditative and deeply sustaining in the reflective resonance it holds is the work of the brilliant Neeraj Goswami.

Life is Beautiful will be a cynosure for all eyes -Neeraj Goswami’s suite of four paintings create a tableau that fixes your gaze on the progression of life through youthful characters.the beauty of the human form and the myriad experiences and expressions that are born of his own contemplative journey. The meditation guru Goswami is a silent genius, his canvases are an odyssey of conversations that swim in the web of soliloquies that speak in the depth of solitude.

The treatment of the form is what brings on the fascinating facet of transcendental meditation and the underlying harmony of empirical experience. In all these images we see a certain sophistication of quietude, an intuitive intent, that tells us that the male gaze can be one of admiration and appreciation. The medley of youth and activity and the tranquil phase of quietude is what excels and endures. Goswami presents the allure of gesture and the perfection of poise in his manner of fusing form and colour in prismatic indices to tell us that the human form is an enduring and eternal form which is also deeply powerful as a visual lexicon.

Tom Vattakuzhy -Art Centrix

If a Gallery can be an oasis Art Centrix at Vasant Kunj Farms is a retreat that seeps into your senses. Monica Jain the curator and Director creates her own epiphany in the inclusion of Kerala’s realist master Tom Vattakuzhy.

Passion Week and Tom Vattukzhy’s canvas Vision After the Sermon is a masterpiece in the language of luminosity.For this Kala Bhavan, Baroda trained artist innovations as a colourist go beyond the popularization of tenebrism. Vattakuzhy has a deep understanding of narrative as well as surreal stances in telling stories within stories; he seems to have discovered a way of managing colours that eschewed the Renaissance practices of tonal unity and continuous modelling. He revels in setting up a juxtaposition of colour tones and weaving in dark zones to enhance the appearance of saturation and brightness and employing discontinuous modelling to enhance the perception of contrast and unity. The crucifix has a dramatic air of poignancy and the priest’s robes remind us of earlier Renaissance paintings by Raphael and Leonardo. The power to comment on society’s many hidden dramas and diatribes in a subtle ironical way is Vattakuzhy’s penchant.

Balaji Ponna -Art District XIII

Footprints in the Mud is a people scape set in lush tropicana by Balaji Ponna. He paints a colorative stance of a group of people -migrants who walk the path of their own destinies. He has created a stirring, yet surreal scene of haunting echoes the banana plant with its verdant leaves is a sentinel that stands for time past as well as time present.Ponna is an academic composer with a fertile mind for the human narrative.He creates a synergy of sadness and harmony within the moods of melancholia and human tribulations.

Ponna says : “ My work is about the journeys of people from far off lands in search of freedom and better opportunities.Migration is the sign of our times. The banana plantation once harvested is cut and destroyed.Likewise the people after their entire labour and work force is sucked out are just thrown to the winds-to find labour /ways for themselves anywhere. In seeking endless journeys of hope and a better life the footprints of these people in the mud they have walked upon is the only imprint that is left.”

Olivia Fraser -Ojas Art

Olivia Fraser’s Blue Lotus is a heady series of 9 studies on the lotus. Fraser has over many years dug deep into Indian literature, the mythic leaves of history and is a yoga practitioner who creates works born of her own spiritual nuances and experiences.

The blue lotus is surrounded by other lighter beauties it is intensely colourful as well as strangely hypnotic, it depicts multiple lotuses –she uses age-old Indian techniques and iconography and scrambles that repetitive stance of chants or mantras to make a startlingly contemporary statement.

Treatment of the lotuses is what fascinates the viewer-Fraser grinds pigments from natural materials such as malachite and lapis lazuli, mixing them with gum arabic and water, picking up brushes made of fine squirrel or mongoose hairs, sitting on the ground with handmade sheets of paper called wasli, and then learning through observation. “In India, if you want to learn miniature painting, you have to follow the process and the rules, which are very strict. Each workshop—or gurukul—may have a slightly varying style, but you learn those rules,” says the artist of her evolution. “ I learned that there is not only one way to draw a lotus leaf, there are many prototypes that belong to Indian history. Through an academic but aesthetic systemized approach with many layers and regulations, I learned to create lotuses according to my own dynamics of design.”

Fraser’s lotus petals are enrapturing; she takes a minor floral motif and plucks it out of its miniature context to set adrift a sombre but radiant,yet meditative arrangement.What ensues is a soothing pulsation of precision and perfection.

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