Painting by Pradeep Mishra.jpg

The Fragrance of Earth

Mumbai based artist Pradeep Mishra recently presented an installation cum painting exhibition at the Guild Gallery, Mumbai. Amrita Gupta Singh says that the exhibition showcased an organic celebration of nature and its cyclical qualities of birth, growth, death, decay and regeneration.

The artist’s central compulsion is to innovate, a thirst for the gratification of that which is novel: a new sound, a new sign, a new word or a new image, new connections between known components, a new trajectory set out upon. Delight comes from the thing itself — its proportions, its tactility, the way it refers to what one has already known. But art also covets the sense with which its particular moments put one in touch; a sense of the fresh, and even, in a limited way, the unprecedented. Art practices in the modern or (post) modern world have introduced multiple subjectivities and contexts, is the artist’s subjectivity alone valid to produce meaning, or does there have to be an engagement with both the subjective-intuitive processes of the artist and the external world in which we live?

Installation detail

It is with this subjective-intuitive premise that I would like to explore Pradeep Mishra’s latest exhibition, Fragrance of Earth, presented by the Guild Art Gallery in Mumbai. After the visual/aural cacophony of identical skyscrapers, vehicles, impatient car-horns and crowded traffic signals, one encountered the unprecedented; a commercial gallery space transformed into a garden of real roses, filled with its fragrance and its seductive qualities, in an organic celebration of Nature and its cyclical qualities of birth, growth, death, decay and regeneration. In our age of war, terror, power and violence, the metaphorical endeavor of collecting rose petals and individual rose plants combined with its various cultural symbolisms of love, sharing, friendship, happiness and human relationships became vigorously regenerative and delightful, even meditative, amidst the controlling mechanisms of a metropolis where most dreams turn into nightmares. Mishra’s installation explores the nature/culture/technology debate, our sense of place, location, history, memory and seeks to define the lost connections between our roots and the community, and our humaneness towards one another. In a period where one is uncertain about the nature of aesthetic value, the very momentary nature of this installation, its mystery and affirmative possibilities forms dialectical relationships between the communicative and social action of this piece. The ‘art object’ here was freed of the vagaries of the market, having its own destiny, back to nature of which we find ourselves a part.

In the exploration of the surface (the gallery floor) as a concept, a kind of rejuvenating energy was released in the act of strewn red petals against the whiteness of the walls, with immediate associations of the life-blood that courses within every being in Nature, the act of cleansing the gallery space by the artist himself after the display, the individual rose plants being given to anyone who would nurture them with the Mumbai monsoons reinvigorating each plant which spent a week’s time in the enclosed gallery space, each enactment, performative in nature, posited a zone of communicative gestures between the artist and the public, in a discourse of the internal and the external, the within and without.

As Mishra says “This installation represents the unflagging streak of resilience life forms share to endure all living conditions whether entirely hospitable or not. Life forms have always displayed the remarkable ability to adapt to any genetic alterations to survive and endure sans complaints against the human race for the damage we have systematically wrecked on the planet”. Mishra is not an activist, but a very sensitive individual expressing the concerns of humanity and the planet via his works, this exhibition being a three-dimensional extension of his earlier paintings. As the artist dreams, I too dream of us collectively developing a sustainable eco-culture, of humans putting aside their power games to nurture Mother Earth as she has nurtured us since time immemorial.