Imagine a gallery morphing into an “animal farm” and presenting a visual exploration of a dazzling newness even by setting standards of neo-realism sought to adapt from a new manner of painting from nature with the art of the past.
“Lovetolive” is an extension of Pradeep Mishra’s earlier works, highlighting an individual’s willingness to live and share its space with other fellow beings without any kind of discrimination. The point to be realised is not about differences, but of the similarities in various forms of life who have moulded their lives according to their needs. The current body of works gives presence of fellow beings with respect human created alternative space.
The artist aims to attain a certain feel which is about sharing and co-existence. The forms and images are not mere elements but eventually become a medium of communication. The staring expression on the faces suggest that care for a healthy growth is required, which seems to have been diverted by a hectic schedule of daily life and the on going politics.
It seems that Mishra has the same idea, perhaps in realisation that modernist manners have reached their limits — indeed have become clichéd mannerisms, an easy language of art — leading him to regress to the art of the past in search of new creative and aesthetic possibilities and inspired emotion.
In an age which mirrors the pseudo-dynamic modern life, with its revolutionary technology and social revolutions, art has to become as dynamic, revolutionary, innovative — as alive with change and newness — as modern society. Perhaps Pradeep realises that newness quickly becomes oldness, which doesn’t mean lastingness, but an art that would last beyond moments and times, to continue to be of interest when the modern becomes another old tradition.
The zany zebra which stands in the first room has to do with the grammar of the use of the perfection of the animal figure. However emphatically present, for him it is another piece of the expressionism as seen in the eyes, but also reflects the natural landscape in itself. For Mishra, it is a sort of microcosmic concentration of macrocosmic nature, a concentration of its magnificence and munificence in one magnificent and munificent figure.
The body of the zebra tells us about how animals must usurp the landscape for it is theirs and theirs alone to live in harmony with the habitat. This work has the grandeur and has a density and immediacy of presence, simultaneously diffused and suffused by atmosphere and expression and insight and delight.
The work of the mule in the inside gallery unveils the beauty of magnificence in man’s “flight to nature”.
The artist’s responsive, spontaneous “handling” of nature, whether in the form of the animal’s eyes or the body in the state of nature shows the uncanny, sensitive attunement to the nuances of nature’s appearance, and the unembellished presentation of its beauty of existence — it is not only a matter of projecting “good feelings” into it, and thus reinforcing them in oneself, but of pondering over the exploitation of the animal kingdom by man in society.
Then there is a series of vermilion drip works that echo the emotional realism behind a utopian naturalism, conspicuously evident in a sort of decorative idealism. The rooster and the fish could indeed belong to the garden of paradise — perhaps the healthy façade of his disillusionment, even mourning for nature.