Man of earth

Ceramicist P R Daroz’s new show comes to the capital after nearly eight years.

I Am Clay’, P R Daroz titles his solo show on now at Art Alive Gallery. The statement could well be Daroz’s artistic credo, his approach to the material he works with, and indeed life itself. “You have to be soft to understand clay,” explains the 66-year-old artist in his soft brogue. “You have to be sensitive to touch, to feel, to the firing, in order to give life to clay.”

This sensitivity, a creative responsiveness to the materiality of clay, is evident in all the works at the show, combined with a control of technique that comes from over 40 years of experience of working with his material.

The works at this show, Daroz’s first in the capital in nearly eight years, develop further his fascination with flat, aerial landscapes seen in the works he showed two years ago in Mumbai at an exhibition organised by Pundole Art Gallery. “I was trying to work out the ridges on a field caused by a tractor’s wheels,” he explains, pointing to one work; “Here I was trying to recreate the insides of muscles,” he says, pointing to another.

“That is the seabed,” he says, referring to a series of 20 ceramic squares in white and turquoise blue glaze, mounted dramatically against a black wall. This is a striking work, the rough, weathered texture of the ceramic, pockmarked with crevices, evoking the ebb and flow of water and even the impression of underwater flora and fauna.

Then there is the ‘Unending Rhythm’ series, modular blocks of matt bronze or white ceramic worked to a stoneware finish and bearing the impressions of musical notes. “These can be placed one on top of the other, going up as high as you want” says Sunaina Anand, owner of the gallery.

If ceramics has made a place for itself today in the booming contemporary Indian art economy, then the one man we probably have to thank for it is Daroz. Trained at the famed Faculty of Fine Arts at M S University, Vadodara, he was invited by J Swaminathan to start a ceramics course at Bharat Bhavan in Bhopal. Among the many awards he’s won in his career is a national award in ceramics in 2004 from the Lalit Kala Akademi.

The 66-year-old sculptor, who works out of his studio in Ayanagar, is known for his large public installations and murals for corporate offices and hotels. But Daroz has consistently been an innovator, experimenting not just with form — from depictions of utilitarian objects to large-scale sculptures such as the urns at the Hyatt Regency, Delhi, and then architectural installations — but also with technique.

The most striking of new directions in his work is the ‘Fired Canvas’ series, 13”x13” wall-mounted squares in which Daroz works in different coloured glazes — blue, orange, green, gold — with almost as much facility as a painter wielding his brush. “It’s extremely hard, when the clay is being fired, to know how the colours will come out,” says Daroz.

‘I Am Clay’ is on at Art Alive Gallery, S221 Panchsheel Park, until October 15