The Guild Art Gallery is pleased to present a new Show titled ‘Linkages/Dialogues’ bringing together  works of four emerging Artists- Anpu Varkey, Lavanya Mani, Om Soorya and Sukhdev Rathod. 
 
Linkages/Dialogues is an attempt to suggest a net of relationships between the participating artists who share certain subject matter and aesthetics. The  dialogues between the pieces reveal surprising connections relating to inter psyche, illusion memory and reality,  urban, rural and social conflicts and the nature of reality:  historical associations between femininity, decorativeness and deception. A certain groping, struggle  and a search for an artistic pursuit is evident in some of the works exhibited 

The  works are so juxtaposed as to introduce subjective responses.

Anpu Varkey talks about her ‘Artistic Pursuits’ - The Artist says:
“These paintings are less about anything definite, as I found it problematic to keep everything lucid within a painting. I’ve found it hard to distinguish between exactly what needs to be painted and what needn’t, so in these works I’ve been effectively not representing what I don’t, or not defining what I needn’t, just focusing on where I wanted to apply colour. I keep finding loopholes within my search, trying to rectify it, as it is the part of the process. I constantly change my approach and thinking, which can be volatile, for often I find myself at a dead end, looking inconsolably at the emptiness I created myself”.  

Lavanya Mani on her  her recent work titled -‘Fox Story - The Blue Coat’  - ”Over the last few years, I have been working with various techniques associated with textiles such as embroidery, tie and dye, appliqué, batik etc in conjunction with painting. Cloth has been at the center of a long set of historical associations between femininity, decorativeness and deception. These have to do, on the one hand, with the way various art &craft practices such as embroidery, knitting, needlework etc, were seen primarily as “women’s work”, as well as to the perceived sinfulness/ excess of the decorative within a patriarchal economy, that privileged austerity and functionality. This could also be related to what was considered to be the inherent deceptiveness of cloth- its ability to hide as well as reveal, and its ability to change the persona of the wearer; tales and fables, that have been associated with it emphasize dyeing and changing colours as a narrative device. Thus, The work titled ‘Fox Story- The Blue Coat’ has tried to explore this idea.

Om Soorya talks about the nature of reality and urban and rural justapositions  "as a search for the constant truth in the reality, which surrounds me. Reality doesn’t merely mean the socio-political arena, it relates to the most inner truth of everything. Conscious mind enters the real world and it searches for the logic in reality. Here all doubts on reality emerge by itself, from the realms of the conscious mind. The question of existence and the reason of Birth, Growth and Death are the phenomenon to be unveiled. At the same time, there is an inherent obligation to live. Concurrent to this thought, the unconscious mind manifests an imaginary world of dreams. Ultimately, my works are being just like a pendulum in between the quest for total existence and the anxieties over the present realities. The idea of life, death and the confusion over the universe, are concurrently repeated in my works. Sometimes the nature of the idea is a kind of contradiction on the present realities."

The title of Sukhdev Rathod’s current work is ‘Contradiction Between Eye and Mind’ about which the Artist says, “for all this work, that I’ve done for this show, the idea about the work had come, when I started to think about the illusions in our daily life. As its true, when the Eye sees something at a moment, the mind starts to relate or compare it with whatever it has in its memory. Thus, I’ve tried to paint both of these versions together, where I’ve painted various objects to narrate the ideas that I have. Every object that I’ve Painted, has its own individuality and a story to tell, which is however interpreted differently by different people and hence remain, open to multiple readings”.