The River Underneath :: India Fine Art
The River Underneath     Artist: Laxman Aelay     18th April 2008 - 1st May 2008     11 a.m. to 7 p.m. (Sundays open)     at India Fine Art, Film Centre Building, 3rd Floor, 68 Tardeo Road, Mumbai 400034     Contact: 022-23520438, 23520439     Email: indiafineart@gmail.com
Exhibition Venue:                                                                                                                                         [ Contact Us ]
India Fine Art, Film Centre Building, 3rd Floor, 68 Tardeo Road, Mumbai 400034 | 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. (Sundays Open)
Write-up by Anahite Contractor

This new world of Laxman Aelay is like the aftermath of Dionysian revelry and excess; in the present series, the artist employs line, not only as his rudimentary tool, but as an appellation, a title, for his anthem.

Lines, solitary in themselves, form a dense jungle, and are all-pervading. Catatonic, schizophrenic lines seem to be hapless in describing the expressionistic pain and angst of Aelay’s Telangana men and women. However, these are lines with a purpose and eventually, with a self-contained destiny. Deceptively realistic modes of formulating the figures are adapted but close scrutiny reveals an abstractionist’s attitude in executing these works, whether they are executed in mixed media on paper or oil on canvas. The tonality and gradation of each nuance of the human figure is a luminous interplay between the constant emerging and vanishing of detail. Mass and gross bodies are flexed and transmuted from stasis to clarity and from clarity to an almost amorphous treatment.

Laxman Aelay’s world of human figures is a universal conglomerate of men and women contorted within their circumstances, even as it is the artist’s intention to comment on the local community itself. It is an arid humanscape and the protagonist could well be Everyman arising out of the very rocks which he inhabits, and he seems to remind us of the fact that the most precious things in life seem to lose their flavour if they are dislocated from their native context.

- Anahite Contractor


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