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Moods of Nature

Mumbai based young painter Ritesh sees nature as his visual resource. His canvases and dark drawings on paper express his love for nature. Aretha K, Mumbai based young art critics tries to go with the mood of Ritesh’s works.

Hands clasped behind his head, eyes half open, peering into the sunlight; silhouetting all that came in his way, forms materialize from the landscape. That is the way Ritesh captures his images. While at his studio, he tries to capture the essence of his visions in the mediums that he prefers to work at that point of time.

All that the eye can see and everything else the mind adds to the visual; smells, sounds and reminiscences of minutes, hours, days and years past, build into a minimal crescendo. The parched paper is black with energy. Forms from urban living find a niche in agricultural spaces. Far from the politics of life, immediate society and State, these basic forms pull one down to grass root level. Utility instruments and transport machines find themselves staring into the eyes of some of nature’s finest produce, playing an awkward game or probably being the backdrop to these luscious forms. The shapes of seeds, pods and other farm products take on centre stage. This co-existence initiates ‘seed’ for thought; sown in relationships between the inanimate and the animate, the mental and the radical, the physical and the mechanical, all culminating in the reproduction of the next visual and thought.

This is no obsessed attachment with bygone times, but only fragments that take on a healthy visual challenge. Lines dismissing and admitting moods continue to camouflage a language, with words making an appearance, the eye may miss or perhaps be transfixed to.

Constant forms of earth and vegetation find their way around the surface of Ritesh’s canvas. They sprout forth life and hope in an even faster dwindling environment; the psychological and the physical. The oneness between the earthen vessel holding firm the bulbous mother-form, which in turn houses entire families of identical characters, each playing their own role in filling up the spaces in between is intelligently held together with rapid lines in charcoal. Swift and executed with precision, the lines resonate with a certain humdrum. Black as soot a watery misshaped moon encloses on other silhouettes and nestles in a resounding earth mound. Lemon green breath stains stay affixed to the canvas where drawings in charcoal continue to imitate nature. They are caught in a linear frenzy like a tangled up fishing net, knotted intensely in some places and easily laid out in others. Nevertheless ironically they remain held down onto a specified setting as the edges of the canvas stay pristine, unlike the drawings on paper, where the edges are smudgy and lines and charcoal dart marks spill out rebelliously.

Ritesh has held on fervently while working on two amazingly unique surfaces with the same quality in thought and application, yet maintaining their utmost temperament.

He spells in subtle ways the nearness of his present environment, even memories.