Beastly tales from here and there
 

Viraj Naik inhabits a world of fantastical beings. Creating his own mythologies, Naik traverses from the world of the credible to create the incredible; he achieves this with a stroke of his ink pen, his graphite pencil or his colour tipped brush. With a leap of his imagination, he enters the world of hybrid sprites and benign ogres.
 

This Goa based artist has a flair for humour running in his veins, one that has struggled and wrested free of his earlier melancholic musings.  At The Goa College of Art in 1998, Naik was tutored in the skill of applying paint on canvas, more importantly though he finally had a venue to unleash his creativity and fostered a strong taste for figurative work.  Naik’s natural love for animals led him to study them closely and scrutinize their physical appearance and demeanour. The similarities between human and animal began to surface in those early days and Naik began to see a parallel between these two worlds.

This predilection for merging the two worlds of man and animal was further sharpened as he did his Masters in Fine Art, in Hyderabad in 2000. Here he honed his skills as a printmaker and graphic artist. The linear nature of the artist’s work is perhaps shaped by this extended exposure to the expressive qualities of line. His current style is primarily graphic and colour comes merely as an enhancement.
 

The exaggeration of features, the clever twisting of bodies and the hybridisation of forms—where man and animal fused in a grisly yet entertaining manner—emerged from a fascination for Egyptian and Prehistoric cave art, a discipline he was exposed to during the course of his studies. Naik finally began blending the two worlds of the primordial animal spirit and that of ‘cultured’ man.

As he explored this darker side, his early works were more foreboding than what we see today. However, he realised his tenor was too terse and finally, stubborn and melancholic forms gave way to lighter humorous creatures who could laugh at their own plight.

Though his sources are ancient, Naik blurs the boundaries between the contemporary and the primeval. His Shamans and forest people parade across the canvas and paper surface in a timeless pageant of life. They escape the trappings of humanity and are free to breathe and strut around in a world where the rules are deviously bent.

In this current body of works, which consist mainly of drawings on paper and a few canvases, Naik presents a slice of this fantastical world that inhabits his mind.
 

A peacock grows a tree from its head. A winged horse merges with a torso of an Atlas-like figure.
The artist crafts a nose the size of a large pumpkin and grafts it to a diminutive human body. He brings together the head of a buffalo with the comically poised body of a wrestler. A rat, a bird and a human all converge into one body and the result is a strange and hilarious character that could belong to the world of Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass. The wise crow ponders as the cunning parrot plots. The oafish, winged lion crouches precariously on stilts with roller-skates below, he is a calamity just waiting to happen – the human face behind the gladiators mask more than confirms this. Meanwhile a passive half-fish-half man contemplates the universe, as if he was Plato or Aristotle introduced from a Greek play.
 

One is constantly tempted to put speech and thought bubbles above the head of these characters as the artist seems to have caught them in the act of pondering some profundity or hatching a wicked scheme. This also comes from the artist’s fondness for caricature and comics. However, taken away from their context of the obvious narrative that comical tales often have, there is a certain gravity that surrounds these beings.

Georgina Maddox

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