When big is big

Scale has always fascinated Paresh Maity, but now he’s experimenting with newer genres in paintings and sculpture.

Three giant sculptures are going up in Mumbai, courtesy its Bombay Municipal Corporation, two at the prestigious Nehru Centre and the third at Worli. The financial capital has not been averse to reserving space for art but has had little space and not too much chance to come by the best — which is usually reserved for the capital, where there is space and flamboyance but little vision in at least its public domain. It is this that has Paresh Maity excited. “Public art is very important,” he says, when I suggest that he must have had to crash his prices for the municipal body to afford his sculptures, “Artists must contribute to art in the public domain.”

 

This is a very different Paresh Maity, pensive, rooted, less given to hyperbole — though, of course, he can’t resist informing that these are among his largest works, and perhaps among the largest sculptures in India — almost as if his new medium had weighed him down. Maity and sculpture are still at odds. He’s the artist with the giant canvases. Why this shift in medium, then?

Maity’s story is too well known, of his flight to art college in Calcutta and then to Delhi, where he was able to establish his credentials and his name, but he shares now the motivation that was to trigger his lifelong passion. “My interaction with art began in Bengal when I would stand and watch idols being prepared for the Puja,” he says. “That was the beginning of my inspiration.” What many would not know is that he modelled figures in clay to sell at village fairs to fund his studies. “But I did not have the money for making sculptures, so I began my career in art with painting.”

Perhaps to compensate, or like many of his canvases because he believes in it, he says, “Sculpture has to be monumental.” He began working in the medium a few years ago, and those pieces — including the ones picked up by the BMC — are recognisably Maity’s for their linear form and the manner in which he uses the human eye. In Bangalore, where he has a house and now spends his summers, Maity first draws his figures, then models them in clay, and finally in fibreglass, which he then transports to Delhi, where in foundries, the works are moulded in wax, then forged in bronze. Even that now seems like a breeze compared to his new penchant for works using recycled motorcycle parts, which is what he showed in Mumbai’s Jehangir Art Gallery, courtesy of Art Musings, and Delhi was treated to a teaser courtesy of “Slow Motion”, his gigantic tortoise mounted for the opening of Gallery Nvya’s Space Two, made entirely of motorcycle parts. Earlier, at the Art Expo in Mumbai, the first of his motorcycle sculptures, called “Kinetic Energy”, an ode to Durga, was well received.

“I love movement, transformation,” he attempts to explain his new love. His Man Friday has served us steaming cups of ginger tea while Maity, ever the quintessential Bengali, offers “toast” as accompaniment. The peripatetic Maity is leaving that night for Singapore, and in the course of our meetings I overhear directions to the travel agent that involve London and Germany. No wonder the recent exhibition also screened a film on Maity’s travels from Kolkata to Kozikodhe. For now, dealers are scouring the Mayapuri junk market for “a hundred Bullet motorcycles” for him to turn into a gigantic installation of 50 ants. “Next,” he says happily, “I’ll move to car parts.”

Nor are these the only changes that have tripped him up mid-career. If photography appears imminent on his canvases, the new direction he’s taken for his mixed media works involves clothes — the kind you and I wear, picked up from Fabindia, then pasted on to canvas, the background to which has been painted, and the fabrics are then drenched in rich colours — red, for instance, or gold. “Even earlier,” he explains, “I used to paste rice paper to get textures on canvases,” but here, the void seems to be the absence — at least so far — of his by-now familiar faces. There is a hint of a cityscape in the background — in his recent works Benares — with the clothes assuming the figurative form. One of these, “Golden Ghat”, is a striking 20-feet across, but one cannot help thinking that on this, his new journey, Maity has just begun the process of self-discovery. “I am,” he says, “enjoying this.” In that, he might be speaking for the collective viewer.