‘Minimal Structures’ by Manish Nai
A solo show titled ‘Minimal Structures’ by upcoming and talented artist Manish Nai consists of a body of his 12 new jute-on- canvas collages.
The works showcased in the show ‘Minimal Structures’ are reasonably understated in their palette. Muted and fluid natural tones dominate his works that appear altogether very orderly and meticulous.
The drawings that are reduced to graphic signs (circle, line, and square) contribute in a great measure to this. The relief-like structure of the various layers that are pasted over each other gets enhanced through the 3-dimensional effect. It, in the process, addresses explicit spatial, sculptural and architectural questions.
Born 1980 in Gujarat, India, Manish Nai secured a Diploma in Drawing & Painting from the L.S. Raheja School of Art, Mumbai. In 2004-5, he received the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Award, New York.
With the layering on canvas of woven jute cloth which the artist cuts and draws out thread-by-thread, and with the usage of gateway tracing paper, he less covers the base, (rather more reveals it), making it his subject, as is very much evident in a new series of his works presented by Mumbai based Galerie Mirchandani + Steinruecke. The space and controlled organizations of poetic colors lend subtlety and charm to his part collage-part paintings.
His recent creations include several large-format diptychs. These have been executed employing a wide range of materials, such as jute and butter paper.
Manish Nai's idiomatic concerns are directly related to his material and medium. Incidentally, he has worked with jute not for sheer artistic reasons; it has got more to do with a twist in his personal life. As it happened, his father suffered a setback in the jute business. The factory store-rooms were loaded with inventory of unutilized colored jute.
A person with an artistic bent, Manish Nai spotted an opportunity even in the moment of adversity. He imagined a curious mix of colors and forms in the stocked jute. He began giving it his unique artistic touch. The artist plucked a few threads, pasted them on the canvas, and painted the rest of it with the same color as the jute.
The artist first pastes thick jute on canvas base and sticks a sheet of butter paper over it. He then applies washes of transparent color on this surface, and fine-grained jute over it. From a distance, they merely seem a combination of dark and light color shades which get halved the canvas in two. A closer look, albeit, however, unveils the intricacy of the artist’s intricate patterns.
Manish Nai is little concerned with one single image or even a composite body of images but rather with the processes. As art critic Ranjit Hoskote has mentioned in an essay: “His art is sustained by a subtle ploy of opposite, contending forces.”
The viewer is enticed, in glancing at these creations, leading them into an awareness of intense palpability; Manish Nai intrigues them with many simultaneous dialogues between surface and depth, woven texture and flat plainness, darkness and light.“
He also attains an illusive, allusive dimensionality in his mixed-media works. Here, the artist summons distances, depths and solidities into being - through the deft modulation of tonality; dark, medium and light all become measures of space rather than mere degrees of visibility in his handling.
