Palette Art Gallery celebrated Earth Day with an exhibition Paradise Regained that opened on April 24th, 2024. In the stunning show are landscapes that have been mined and re-envisioned as memoirs of experience as well as fantasy in creating compulsively detailed, meticulously painted, and emotionally potent works. We have artists such as the brilliant landscape artist Paramjit Singh who has done landscapes for more than 60 years to the younger talented lot from Kerala.
Curator and critic Uma Nair states: “Here are a suite of paintings that have been created in the solitude of artist studios, they reflect robust imagination as well as the beauty of nature’s rhythms according to a specific time, climate and season. These intricate paintings speak to the most pressing themes of contemporary life: beauty and kindness, cruelty and loneliness, contentment, and even loss. But they also call attention to the quiet moments of life and the knowledge that all disturbances eventually calm.”
All these artists create a conversation between form and content all cradled in the crucible of earth studies as envisioned by the artists themselves. While the treatment of each landscape is distinct and different we can see that the making of stimulating landscapes becomes important when the landscapes become an important memory and wraps itself around our senses.
While Paramjit creates images that unwind like an album of memories in its many vistas, KP Prasad creates surreal drama in his intricate detailing that harks back to his native town in Kerala. The veteran Shaji Appukuttan uses overview landscape studies and perspectives in the depiction of cinematic indices, which he laces with light in phantomic fragments . Sumesh Kumballur has a deepened gravitas in the way he creates moody embers of tree studies that look like a dream sequence that comes alive in the nocturnes of life. For KP Pradeepkumar we see the glimpses of lighter intensities of the native sojourn. Sanam Narayan has a running thread of philosophy in his work that laces multiple literary references to create a dialogue between the mythical and fantastical.
In its own melody of the many perspectives we see in Paradise Regained , Palette Art Gallery creates a show that tells us that we must preserve as well as savour the beauty of the earth and all that is therein. Then this Earth Day these landscapes reaffirm the essential notes and registers of landscapes all over the world and the underlying message is that amongst its many rhythms it is landscapes such as this that create canticles that breathe like earth songs in a world torn by the rifts of war.
