Umesh P. K.
Let There Be Fire
2017
Oil on Canvas
96 x 56 inches
Umesh P. K. is an artist based in Baroda. He has completed his MFA in Painting from Hyderabad Central University in 2008. Through his works Umesh narrates a pictorial fiction of an imagined geography, its rituals, and creation myths. Like Borges, and Tolkein he too creates a range of paintings, drawings and sculptures to substantiate the legitimacy of this past. His first solo show Excavated Memories- Posthumously Foretold Chronicles was exhibited at Contemplate Art Gallery, Coimbatore. His recent group shows include Ho~ARt at Krishnakriti Festival, Hyderabad; Another life is possible, MNF Gallery, Kochin Sound of Silence , Kalakriti Art Gallery, Hyderabad Young Contemporaries II, Contemplate Art Gallery, Coimbatore and July Show, The Guild Art Gallery, Mumbai.
Artist Statement
In my artistic pursuit Imageries of my works are drawn from a world of mythopoeia. In the momentary lapse of reason, they appear so sudden as a shooting star on the horizon of my mindscape. The stroke of such visions instantly frees me from the grasp of the pattern of mundane thoughts. They flash light into our deeper interior world and tell us that the individual is not a closed system but a focus in the collective mind. The impact left by those moments stay inside over a period of time and gradually gives way for a pictorial articulation. I present each of the work as a device which can turn the viewer look inwards and find our inner reality.
Though the genesis of works takes place in the realm of irrational faculties such as imagination and intuition, they conjure up into definitive shapes by processing through pictorial tools derived from our empirical perception. During that process I go deeper into the meticulous details of depictions, for instance, while painting a tree I try to understand the tree in its entirety by contemplating on the very nature of it, to do so I avoid all kinds of photographic references and depend only on the sedimented memory within the self. It helps me to retain my mnemonic ability and imaginative power in a digital era overwhelmed by images. When we immerse completely in the process the very act of doing painting pacify the mind and elevate us to a meditative state.
As a person hail from Kerala, the kind of lush landscapes recurring in my visual language may be instilled into me in my childhood. But sometimes they are even capable of transporting us to faraway lands and remote past with which I never had a direct encounter.
The recent work titled as ‘Let there be Fire’ shows a vast landscape, apparently a primordial forest with a circle of fire in the centre, the burned out portion of forest turned into a void in the middle as a metaphor of the void in the very centre of our being.
Courtesy : anantart.com, paletteartgallery.com