The paintings which are marked with the artist’s paint brush, frequent drips and patterns of colors, exude an enticing brightness. The color blue, which makes its appearance in almost all the paintings, sets a pervasive quality in them while the controlled waves of little black lines punctuate the broadness of the canvas by encrypting details into the monochrome of the plain surface. They create a structured yet unfinished re-rendering of figurative temple and festive structures in the Kathmandu valley which float silently in the frame. The rounds of a chariot wheel, a parasol or a little, white dot in an earthy ground of a light green meadow, mark a ritual in procession. [break]
Bijay Gajmer
And as if through an extension of the regular encounter with vermillion in the multiple idols and temples in the city, the color red is flattened and dotted in the canvasses. Similarly, the use of pink evokes an edible quality, like a sweet meat or a rose petal. The green rounded and squared patterns transform into a reminiscent tree, its branches placed at the feet of Gods or pulled in a procession across cobbled streets.
Through the interplay of warm colors, Manandhar’s canvasses evoke a cultural experience that’s not new to the inhabitants of Kathmandu. In its darkened alleys with multi storied buildings, an array of processions are always taking place. Sometimes it’s colored in the celebration of a festival and everyday in the rush of office hours when two and four wheelers jam pack the corridors with incessant honking, leaving a trail which is hard to surpass for any passerby.
Here the lines of class and caste structures merge into one destination that’s directed by a passage of procession which disembarks into other smaller alleys as it progresses. The vibrancy of the canvasses then becomes an illusion that’s dabbed with brightness. Every lurking difference is fixed with a ‘unity in diversity’ appropriation.
As the artist, mentions in his concept note, his influences have been accumulated from the ‘transcendental experience’ of attending jatras. There are other influences from ‘Kumari’ and ‘Dashain’ including the Mandala. If the canvasses are wiping out the difference of multiplicity, the aura around the artist including his own interpretation is doing the opposite. It’s reasserting our collective fascination with our ‘myriad sets of temples and festivals’ along with the impulse to trace out an origin to fixate it with a caste identity.
The influences in the artworks could have been fore grounded by the artist’s Newar identity but the colors are transgressing them. Manandhar is expressing his encounter with modernity in a combination of colors that once redefined modernity in art. In ‘Utsav’ temples, idols, processions and Gods reside in a tumbling, chaotic city of wonders where its concurrent decay is often forgotten in a spark of a bright color. But this reflection comes with a price; the paintings are an appendage to a modern home that’s designed to evoke warmth and happiness.
Even the coarseness of jute in his smaller work has a patterned, smoothness through the division of space. And the suggestive bird’s eye view of his browner canvas (Utsav 6) hesitantly references other cultural encounters; the ghats of Benares being the prime one. The yellow dab of paint let in between a smother of tan brown in this canvas, is dotted with maroon points, reproducing a boating experience in the holy city’s numerous ghats.
Each canvas holds an elusive intensity which is enrobed in the artist’s personal encounters. Its interpretive potential is deepened by the choice of colors, yet the manner in which the exhibition was introduced sets some significant questions about modern art practice. Who was inaugurating the exhibition became more important than what was in the paintings, therefore the initial confusion on my part about whose exhibition it was. One of Nepal’s finest art exports inaugurated the exhibition, signifying his approval of the artist’s finesse and comparisons followed about generational art practice. But even if the exhibition hadn’t been inaugurated by a ‘somebody,’ the paintings would remain the same.
(The exhibition will continue till June 30.)
The writer is a graduate of Arts & Aesthetics from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. dikshyakarki@gmail.com
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