ART CITIES:Paris-Manish Nai
The works Manish Nai, defy categorization, comprising of jute (coarse or fine), butter paper, handmade paper, his collages conceive intricate forms. He treats every new work as a passionate performance done with renewed zest, evoking a specific mood. Nai creates by amalgamating jute on his works. He lays it flat, there are open spaces in the jute, and at times he also colors the surface though most of the time the cloth is left bare. His color palate is restricted and in earth tones.
By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Galerie Karsten Greve Archive
“Matter as Medium” is the first solo exhibition in France of Manish Nai. His composite and multiform work summons a set of references and affinities from both Arte Povera in the use of discarded materials, cardboard, papers and fabrics in particular, and procedural art, in so far as the protocols and systems of artistic creation set up by the artist in themselves define the final art object. Manish Nai has worked with jute not for pure artistic reasons; it has got more to do with an event in his personal life. His father suffered losses in his jute business. The factory was loaded with inventory of unused colored jute. A person with an artistic bent, Nai saw an opportunity even in adversity. He imagined a curious mix of forms and colors in the stocked jute to which he started giving his artistic touch using his imagination. He plucked a few threads, pasted them on the canvas, and painted the rest of the canvas with the same color as the jute. Contiguous to a wooden structure, Manish Nai’s compressed sculptures fall within the frontier of two and three dimensional planes. The series of pastels shows a different facet of the artist’s work. By using subtle illusionist methods, he appears to print reliefs, depressions and protrusions on the surface of the paper, whose real formal flatness can only be assessed after careful inspection. The “Billboards” series stem from a sociological exploration of public space in Mumbai. Following the recession that began in the global economy in 2008, a multitude of billboards were left partially vacant, without advertisements. Photographed on the roadside and then combined digitally and arranged by the artist, these compositions represent the concept of serendipity or happy coincidence. The compressed sculptures made of newspaper along with the assemblage of colourful recycled cloth sticks stem from the reuse and sustainability of objects that generally have an ephemeral life. Intimately linked to the Indian way of life, the country counting nearly a hundred different newspapers, in nineteen languages, the newspaper sculptures are compressed and moulded around a lightweight wooden frame.
Info: Galerie Karsten Greve, 5, rue Debelleyme, Paris, Duration: 10/9-29/10/16, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-19:00, www.galerie-karsten-greve.com
