Unknown Artist
61 x 76 cm; 24 x 30 in
Utpal Verma is the son of the landscape artist Ram Kumar. He had a solo showing with Gallery Espace many years ago. This is a recent work that he did when he came on holiday to India. Utpal lives in Australia and says that he is deeply influenced by the shades and velvet moorings of the moonlight. This work is a fractured image of the landscape in the mood of a sunset sienna wherein the crimson tenor of the night sky skims the moonlit strata and springs a planar construct. The Cubist element writ large on the work, Utpal is like the Cubist masters who rejected the inherited concept that art should copy nature, or that they should adopt the traditional techniques of perspective, modeling and foreshortening. Like them, Utpal wants instead to emphasize the two-dimensionality of the canvas. So he reduces and fractures objects into geometric forms, and then realigns these within a shallow, relief like space. The mood is created by using multiple or contrasting vantage points along the horizontal plane. Uma Nair, March-2007