‘Hair-raising’ fantastical landscapes that denote a futuristic reality

On the eve of his solo in the US (2006), entitled ‘Landscapes Towards a Supreme Fiction’, The New York Times writer Ken Johnson, has mentioned of his paintings, not small in size, yet carrying a miniaturist feel to them, reminding the viewer of Indian miniature painting tradition. Inspecting the intricately and meticulously detailed structures, statuary & vegetation, one can see they are made with a brushy, though not perhaps overly exacting touch - grounding the dreamy imagery comprised within in a very tactile sensuousness.

His ‘hair-raising’ fantastical landscapes can easily be considered for covers of science-fiction illustrations by writers like as Samuel R. Delany or Stanislaw Lem, as the critic mentions in his review, and adds: “On canvases, which measure eight feet across, done in stained-glass colors, he gives bird's-eye views of grid-based realms. In them, nature and architecture, ceremony and function as well as the post-apocalyptic future and the primordial past apparently strike an eerie equilibrium. Hardly any people are visible in the paintings dotted with a lot of quiet animation: neon letters and signs appear in the deep blue skies, lights float and glow, geometric objects hover, flames burn from the headless statues’ necks.”

In his large-scale oil paintings, the artist dips into being a realm of his own making: hallucinatory, albeit grounded in precise observation of the world around. His art like an animated cartoon that brings together astronauts and cavemen synthesizes profound conflagrations, sees delight inextricably bound to terror.

The painted landscapes depict inter-connected systems, which carry energy and information, the flows of light and matter moving in different directions, interweaving of technology and biology, the solar systems’ genetic coding. Seen from an omnipotent viewpoint, they evoke cosmological diagrams, as if inferring a theological program. The fluorescent colors tend to ape the special effects of a jazzy science fiction film. It refers a futuristic reality - partly palpable, partly virtual. For him, painting is an anthology of details, which needs to be read and deftly decoded.