Tuesday, July 6, 2010

Om Soorya's solo show at The Guild Art, NY

The Guild Art, NY presents the second solo show for Om Soorya. It’s a new body of paintings that further explores surreal landscapes. This Kerela born artist, now based in Hyderabad, produces surreal dream-like landscapes that look to decipher the fine line between the real and the perceived. They are occupied by both negative and positive energies he depicts in an array of fascinating forms.

His usage of pigment is intuitive yet fluid. The rich tones along with lines varying from watery blurs appear very much like a twilight zone. The artist did his MFA from University of Hyderabad and his BFA from College of Fine Arts, Trivandrum. Om Soorya's work has been showcased at major art galleries in India and abroad. During the artist in residence program of Pro Helvetia, he spent a couple of months in St. Gallen in May 2009. His resultant series of watercolors, entitled ‘Silence-Breathless’, dealt with the slavery and its impact on today’s modernist India.

The project he worked on was an extension of the subject matter he had been engaged with for a while. Inherently, the body of work looked to the certain rural aspects of his life. It was a small autobiographical unwritten history of a locality of his childhood in north of Kerala. Explaining how he lives in the midst of contradictions, the artist quips:

"Villages become urban when you displace someone, often improperly, from one place to another. I talk about the nature of reality and urban and rural juxtapositions as a search for the constant truth in the reality, which surrounds me. Reality doesn’t merely mean the socio-political arena; it relates to the most inner truth of everything. Conscious mind enters the real world and it searches for the logic in reality. Here, all doubts on reality emerge by itself, from the realms of the conscious mind.”

In essence, the mystical idea of life, death and the utter confusion over the universe, concurrently recur in his work. It underlines the fact that aesthetics is as vital to him as core content, an aspect that is anply evident in his new show.

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