Yogic canvases

Manu Parekh’s new series depicts an abstract identity of Varanasi

In his latest show Faith Manu Parekh revisits Benares/ Varanasi as an artist, after many years; unlike his earlier series that depicted the cityscape in dark blues and browns; the new canvases are bright, vibrant and colourful. It seems he is viewing Benares in a new light where the city seems to have re- invented itself from a mere ritual space to a modernist/ postmodernist abstraction of the idea of rituals or shared religious experience.

The latest stage in his oeuvre can be seen in three major rubrics; the first viewing the ghats and the life of the city from the vantage point of a boat floating down the Ganges from which the artist perceives the city as if from a distance. Thus one sees remnants of funerary pyres, trees and shrines, suggestions of yoni- linga forms, flowers floating in the waters, evoking as though moments in time or ideas as a jumble or collage of the lived experience on the ghats.

The second rubric has more formalised symbology derived from Indian religious art, re- interpreted by the artist within the context of the holiest of holy cities, where Benares the city of choice to attain death or ritual purification is more an idea than an experience.

The entire city of Vishwanatha ( Shiva) is perceived in religious geography as mandala, a microcosmic recreation of the Shaiva macrocosm. Parekh also reuses mandalas and yantras such as yoni- pitha that seem to embody the fiery creative energy of the feminine, painted in red or bright yellow interspersed with red flowery offering, holding in its centre the circular form or locus of the linga.

The entire composition recreates the PurushaPrakriti union leading towards light, creation and fecundity in new life forms.

There is inherent discourse of sexuality within the various motifs and decorative forms in Parekh’s paintings. — Dr Seema Bawa is an art historian, curator

and critic