SONGS OF SOIL

The power and intensity of a landscape in art is an attempt to reconstruct a more universal approach to notions of identity, society, refuge, and utopia. The reason why landscapes hold our attention is their power to withhold concentrated islands of human gaze as well as invite a study of understanding wherein we can be rooted to the spot like guardians of life. 

Enchanting islands

These six artists who align themselves along the Southern shores give us various worlds that mingle vibrantly in the landscapes from diverse parts, forming both recognizable and distant realms, with an enchanting mixture of culture-specific properties.

These works only further serve to evoke and to put into question, rather than to 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 sequences 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 nnarrative contexts.

Magesh’s sacredness

Magesh’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 somber view of natural history and the individual’s relationship to it.

Pradeep’s poetics

Pradeep KP poetic works, memorialize events and elements through symbolic abstraction rather than discrete monument. Pradeep’s 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

Sumesh’s lush tropicana filled green environs recreate the vistas of the artifacts of memory and forgetfulness, presence and absence, as he meditates on what history and reality leave 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 the nurturing that weaves into the personal narrative.

Sanam

Sanam Narayanan’s lithe and dulcet handling of the Untitled works embodies his method of capturing haunting aspects of the past as he reframes them to highlight the contrast of the realms of reality  and what memory reveals. Soft and tranquil is the landscape that reflects  a location of such incomprehensible quietude, that  the viewer sees the sentinel like beauty of plants and trees and a lone mound that rivets in the planar picturisation of a perfect paradisal postcard.

Umesh's surreal stance

 As a person who  hails from Kerala, 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, the frog looking at the crescent moon transports us to distant  lands and speaks of unknown encounters.There is in the storyline the interconnectedness 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 and the resonance of an  integral unit that balances in harmony both man and nature.  

Tropical atmospherics

In the six 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 rural and resonance filled in the reality of what is rough-hewn though embalmed in living memory. 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.