‘Visages’, at Art Musings features a group of established artists including Baiju Parthan, Paresh Maity, Raghava KK, Laxma Goud, Neeraj Goswami, Shibu Natesan, Sunil Padwal. Facial expression presented by an artist is often within a specific context. Its purpose as a visual cue is to trigger thought processes and evoke emotional responses, regardless of the style – abstract, figurative, or non-representational.
Baiju Parthan’s lenticular work ‘Seizure’ made by layering street photography with material gathered from the internet, explores the moment when an epiphany is triggered by an unexpected event, like an unexpected blow from the Zen master’s walking stick hishaku that can induce a seizure to bring on Satori in meditator. Here the mundane occurrence of a police intervention at a traffic junction is presented as a metaphor for an unexpected event leading to epiphany. In Paresh Maity’s dynamic mixed media painting ‘Golden Gaze’, the angular faces, with their myriad expressions, are closely cropped and juxtaposed with their surroundings. Rendered in a distinctive palette of brown and shadowed yellows, with the interplay of light and shadow, the bold geometric faces stare at you piercingly. Raghava KK’s series ‘Through the Looking Glass’ comprise of a suite of small charcoal portraits of a child. His innate curiosity allows him to explore the myriad possibilities of what can he be next. Laxma Goud, best known for his early drawings that depict eroticism in a rural context, presents early aquatint intaglio & etchings. These interpretations of memories of rural and tribal vivacity through an urban grid, display surreal libidinal tones that mingle fantasy and poetry. The angular geometrical posturing in Neeraj Goswami’s charcoal drawings yield to lyrical moments of repose. Goswami plays with form, breaking them deliberately to bring about a symmetrical geometry of shapes Distortion he eschews and paints figures that are stylised abstracted explorations of the anatomy. In the monochromatic works of Shibu Natesan’s Mastan and Sunil Padwal’s untitled portrait, artistic interpretations remind us of the profound connections and reflections that faces can evoke in our shared human experience. Bold and simple, the works are bereft of any superfluous details, while the layered technique adds a dramatic dimension to the paintings.