- >>
- INDIA
Into the depths of it, walking by spaces to eat, print, please. A rough road rolling away beneath my almost plastic, suede, shaded, beige, foot cover, a slim glance towards the sky, walking, sinking into stories being written on by-lane walls.
A push, a left, a right, another car goes by this almost narrow, yet wide passage to open skies of art. Sunday brims with excitement, people in colourful garbs of summer days, roads, lanes and incredibly long passageways, stores with the usual things, blocks of newspaper stands, patchwork throws, blanket woes, leading to narrower lanes and wider minds.“On the left,” they say, a short passage leads one to stairs on the right, into Galleryske’s opening day of exhibitions by Masooma Syed and Sunoj D.
The first room houses ‘Sublime West’ by Masooma Syed where the art works carefully plant ideas of life juxtaposed with life stories on newspaper and cardboard dioramas. Her drawings of faces from Fellini’s films to Indian classics tread on newspaper headlines speaking of terrorism, war-time struggle, forming a curtain of contrast and evoking thoughts of impermanence in human emotion.
Syed’s works combats with ideas of manufactured art, polish and perfection, using mediums and processes breaking away from conventionality through informal theatrical renderings. Syed states “it is about war, human struggle, human relations, life in metro cities and art, all intertwining and overlapping in a manner that makes it hard to separate one from the other.”
An opening in the gallery space leads one into the mind of another artist, into an ‘Estuary,’ a collection of sculptures and paintings by Sunoj D which quietly defines his childhood days where he grew up going to the fields with his grandfather; nature and land creating art through various forms and mediums. The artist through his works aims to provide us context and locate us within our complex environments.
His works include, 264 Summer rivers meeting the sea, rivers drawn out with 264 brushes from the artist’s studio span through a sea of ultramarine blue, Past touches present/present touches past which explores the passage of time where eleven concentric terracotta urns nestle perfectly in succession, each cradling the next.
His work, If only mountains had seeds brings about a sense of emptiness that arises at the loss of something which triggers an environment where it would be impossible to create or rebuild. Organic, evolving, free flowing movement of mediums and ideas find their rightful space in Sunoj D’s exploration through art, citing the relationship between human beings and nature.
Two artists, and their varied thought processes, confined in a space yet breaking away from the everyday, conforming to their rightful spaces on walls, leaning, held onto, creating spaces of colour and narratives on unconventional materials.
As one moves from one piece to another, viewers surround art pieces, wandering, wondering minds, an artist draws on newspaper, moulds pieces of cardboard into sculptural stories, another artist uses clay, he paints on fabric, organic, natural constituents, powerful pieces of art.
Galleryske invites spaces of thought, within a bustling, city of contrasts, displaying and depicting areas of interaction, through still pieces of visual art, speaking and identifying with city dwellers and lives.
Sublime West by Masooma Syed and Estuary by Sunoj D, at Galleryske on view till 04 October 2014 at: Shivam House, 14F Middle Circle, Connaught Place, New Delhi.
