PAINTING EXHIBITION - A solo show of the Recent Works of Mohan Malviya - 19th to 30th April, 2007

Exhibition Info : For Mohan Malviya, subconscious world is part of his lived past. It also brings to mind the painter in his garret, struggling both materially and within himself. His influences are far less vocal, far more layered in the subconscious, emerging from his retreats into the forests where he lived among the tribals for long stretches of time.
"That must have stayed with me," he considers, "somewhere at the back of my mind." Not all of it was in the mind, however, for like them, Mohan chose to have his body tattooed with the tiny dots that decorate their skins. If the tattoos of the tribals of Chhatisgarh burned themselves into his subconscious mind, his frequent visits to Bhimbetka, where the cave paintings recall the aesthetic sensibilities of our primal ancestors, also remained with him. Here were reminders that life was ephemeral, but it was also part of an evolutionary chain.

The dot is Mohan's most visible element, but it is also the start and, he thinks, the end of each work. "Painting," he says, "is ultimately a dot." Even technology, broke down into pixels, will concede that as the ultimate truth. "Dots are very important to me. My work is incomplete without them."
In his works there is the inevitable layering, the depths and dips and gradations and, lest you forget, the directional dots, but the canvases are now radiant with colours. Not all together, for Mohan is much too spartan for that - yet - but each takes its own vernacular, each is complete in itself.
Mohan says, "my paintings are about creation - they have everything and nothing." This
notion of nothingness, of zero, of void even, is his strongest link between science, the world he experiences both as a person and an artist, and his art.

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