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Women on canvas
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Paris Mohan Kumar’s works pay tribute to women and nature
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The colours, mostly blue, are subtle. The subjects convey a sense of his constant easy engagement with the world.
Paris Mohan Kumar is in town, with the topic close to his heart, ‘Women and Nature.’ The paintings on display at the Leaf Art Gallery at Nanthencode are full of both.
Women have been a deep influence on him, he says, from the togetherness he enjoyed with his mother and grandmother to the camaraderie he shares with his wife and five daughters. He comes to Kerala from Paris often to engage with his other love, natural beauty, which the State has in abundance.
“I love its nature, but not the social scene,” the outspoken artist says. So one of the paintings on display, ‘The futuristic Malayali,’ shows a human being neck-deep in a swollen river but with hands cupped to collect the trickle from a tap. “The Malayali’s problem is his intelligence,” says the artistsarcastically.
He has exhibited in Paris, where he has lived since the age of 20. Vienna, a landmark city of the arts, has seen his works. The Mahe-born artist straddles the global art canvas with a nimble foot, wearing the honours received, even UNESCO’s choosing him for one of its exhibitions, lightly.
Mohan Kumar proclaims that he does not belong to any school. His style is his own, distilled from his experiences of the world. His subjects merge with the background in most of his paintings. The women in them have almost expressionless faces. The painting ‘Bonded housewives’ have three women depicted akin to the pillars of a house.
Bonded labour
“It is almost bonded labour. These housewives support the house; if they dither, everything falls down,” he says.
There is a series of paintings with the title ‘Woman and nature.’ Here, Mohan Kumar has drawn some dream locales of his, subtle but beautiful, and placed a lone woman in each of them. “Women can never be found alone in such places these days. So, I decided to give them an opportunity for it this way,” he says.
The painting ‘Weavers’ has a woman entangling her companions with her tresses in a serpentine knot. He says it depicts the problems women create to those of their sex.
The exhibition will be on till October 31.
RAJEEV G.R
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Metro Plus
Bangalore
Chennai
Coimbatore
Delhi
Hyderabad
Kochi
Madurai
Mangalore
Puducherry
Tiruchirapalli
Thiruvananthapuram
Vijayawada
Visakhapatnam
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