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In a land without trees

‘Shall I buy a rocking horse and when nobody sees shall I sit on it and rock?’ asks Gayatri Gamuz who is presenting her latest set of works at the Hacienda Gallery, Mumbai on 18th October 2007. In this solo, Gayatri deals with the plastic things brought into the organic world of human lives and generates a cultural debate.

We live in a symbolic devastated garden; the “land without trees” is a daily challenge. The modern world imposes on the individual the wonderful and attractive and at the same time the unmanageable and hard lifestyle of comfort while the psyche/spirit is fighting for survival… How and from where to start again? How to restore a destroyed land, body and psyche?

The nostalgia for the real world creates the pseudo-world, pseudo-forest, pseudo-flowers and pseudo-wild animals. How to find the right path within the deep desire to go back to what we were? And how to do it without being eaten by a lion on the way? (A woman was gravely injured in the safari park of Bewdley by a female lion when she decided to fulfill her life dream of hugging a lion.) How to find the balanced way? How not to make mistakes? Shall we buy for the time being some toys for our children? Shall I buy a rocking horse for my boy and sit on it when nobody sees me?

Nostalgia comes from the Greek world nostos (return) and algos (suffering), so nostalgia is the suffering caused by an unappeased yearning to return. Another word for nostalgia in Spanish is añoranza which comes from the Catalan enyorar derived from the Latin word ignorare (to be unaware of, not know, not experience, the lack or miss)…. The human feels undoubtedly nostalgic for something which has been robbed from him.

With the Industrial Revolution in the beginning of the 19th century the fashion of zoos and also of realistic animal toys arrived all over Europe, two phenomena (as John Berger sees) which are a clear monument to the historical loss created by the emerging capitalistic culture.
In my paintings I play with the symbolism of toys and plastic elements as a metaphor of the capitalistic culture which separates us from the natural world and at the same time creates the perfect substitutes to give contentment to the modern man. The plastic elements are a sarcastic portrait of the unconscious human presence in the natural world.

In the painting ‘Life got complicated (I)’ a big bird is patiently standing in a bucket of water in a mood of adjustment to the new reality of a manipulated world dominated by the intelligent human. In ‘Window’, where a dove is looking through a hole in a cage, I, the viewer, am the one who is in captivity while the bird is on the other side observing me through a metaphoric open window, the roles are inverted and I am not the one who is introspecting and studying the bird but the one who is exhibited for the bird to observe and analyse. The painting of the musk deer with the toy water gun pointing at it has a bit of black humour where the sensitive viewer cannot avoid a profound identification with the human 'aggressor” qualities.

My work is a reflection on the nostalgia of the human psyche, a reflection on the psyche of the loss.