Light as creation is a surreal signature

Divyaman Singh’s solo Light as Creation at Bikaner House, featuring a mix of old and recent work that employs the artist’s signature use of surreal qualities and the idea of commenting on nature and our place within it, set the tone for his solo  exhibition that was simple, lucid and split  into three parts according to thematic intensities.

 

The sun and cosmic auras

Displayed in minimalist moorings it is the trio of cosmic studies of the sun created as a palette of sunset hues that stand in silence in the third room at the LTC.This trio tells us that it is solar energy that keeps the world living.This trio also tells us that life is about sustenance that we receive from solar energy.The colours in Divyaman’s hands create their own kinetics.

Divyaman takes an immersive approach to his subjects, of landscape within cosmic echoes, transposing sunrises and sunsets into ephemeral studies. His work draws on a wide range of places, and mirrors the lexicon of aerial and distant scenes .His brushes  draw in space with lines and formlessness, exploring the choreographies of volume and movement, the potential of the gravity and torsion of expanses of sky in space. In celebration of the sun and the sky he embraces observation—fusing his own work with lost trajectories and territories  as a way to reimagine the present and honour the past.

 

Silence and isolation

Divyaman works in silence and isolation, through days and nights, hours and minutes coping with the science of Delhi’s heat, working with an unseen  and energy that governs the universe and it is the layers of colour, of soil and of the lacing of light that tell us that these landscapes  echo  in the ocean’s tides, in the metabolism of life’s rhythms and the energy metabolism that keeps us alive. The sunset or the sunrise both become twilight zones that  radiate light; and it is by this light that as humans see the map of possibilities. The scarlet series reminds us of crimson tides.

 

Midnight blue and lithe Landscapes 

A pair of midnight blue studies stand as a surreal signature in the handling of sea studies making us think of the waves of the oceans across the world.The dynamics of darkened recesses and the tints and the strokes of currents all sift into a tenuous texture of darkness and deep momentum as you think of the great French song La Mer (The Sea).On the same note in blue are a few lipid atmospherics of landscapes that wrap itself around our senses.

 

Inner intensities 

Set directly on the planar and moody terrain of landscapes, it is a dark night and sand dunes that acts as site-specific parallels to the works in the exhibition, inviting the viewer’s reflection into the inner intensities of shade and shadow. The show incorporates an enlivened and silent soliloquy —of trees stilled by life, and cosmic echoes of the sun and earth, that is imbued with an enigmatic pathos that has become emblematic of Divyaman’s oeuvre.We think of rivers and seas.

We think of the great Hermann Hesse who said: 

“… the river is everywhere at once, at the source and at the mouth, at the waterfall, at the ferry, at the rapids, in the sea, in the mountains, everywhere at once, and that there is only the present time for it, not the shadow of the past, not the shadow of the future.”

 

Trees as silent sentinels

Divyaman Singh is a silent solitary artist who paints in the four walls of his studio. He says he has the desire to paint when his mind pushes him into its own passions of reason and all calculations of emotion.His tree series are different moods as well as a monochromatic trio in brown embers.The pink stroked bounty is a delight that reminds us of the cherry blossoms planted all over the world.

 

Rendering of reality

When we look at his series of landscapes and studies of trees all done in in impressionist mood, it seems like pages of the earth, we are drawn into an essay of the rendering of reality, of what it is; perhaps a place where truth is won or lost, where beauty means anything to the human eye, where mathematics, God, and the colour of your  eyes speak volumes.

These landscapes lit with an inner light are born  out of  solitude and a subtle strangeness, where one mind can touch another, perhaps touch a constellation of others, or touch the spirit of its time and the soul of the future — this is the great miracle that makes an artist sit and take the pliant brush and keep painting to fill the surges that siege him from within.

The great Russian author and philosopher Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s words spring into vision as a backdrop for this show.

“Nature, the soul, love, and God, one recognizes through the heart, and not through the reason… Reason is a tool, a machine, which is driven by the spiritual fire.”

His words hover through these limpid landscapes , setting the scene for the artist’s exploration into his own evolution that is both emotional as well as understanding the physical and sensorial. The vast horizon looks like a still from an aerial view and says everything is about the beauty of the earth.