Doors of Perception : The Art of Manoj Kachangal
Contents: 1. Editors note: Portrait of an artist as a young man/Ratnottama Sengupta. 2. Curator’s note: Doors of Perception/Vinod Bhardwaj. 3. In conversion: Aesthetics is the only philosophy of art/Ratnottama Sengupta. 4. Essays: i. A landscape of colours/Prayag Shukla. ii. Colours sing, not the flowers/Vinod Bhardwaj. iii. An intimacy with nature/Keshav Malik. iv. A painterly game/Sovon Som. v. The vast spread of horizon/Anis Niyazi. vi. A Raga of colours/Jawahar Goel. vii. Antaryatra/Vinod Bhardwaj. viii. Emotive colours/Prayag Shukla. ix. Where land meets the sky/Aruna Bhowmick. x. In search of the abyss/Bhavna Kakar. 5. Recent woks. 6. In review: i. States of mind/Pradyumna Sharma. ii. Of forms and the formless/Aaj. iii. Hint of poetry/Ashok Dashora ‘Suman’. iv. A love for space/Ratnottama Sengupta. v. Bridging earth and sky/Samir Dasgupta. vi. Hues in harmony/Nonika Singh. vii. Shades of inner thought/Nikita Singh. viii. A vocabulary of colours/Madhur Tankha. ix. The more the merrier/Zehra Jumbhoy. x. Art deco in contemporary expressionism/Joy Roy Choudhary. xi. Away from the walls/Ratnottama Sengupta. xii. A journey into the elemental/Oindrilla Maity. 7. In retrospect. 8. Sound bytes. 9. On screen: Through the chinks of his cavern/Devottam Sengupta. 10. Citation. 11. Visitor’s book. 12. From the album. 13. Biosketch: Manoj Kachangal. 14. About.
From the Curator’s Note: This exhibition is a milestone in the relatively short but nonetheless insightful career of a young artist. Nearly one hundred paintings, spanning more than a decade, are reproduced in this volume. Doors of Perception makes accessible the development of a young and gifted Painter of Madhya Pradesh, one of the trendsetters in the so-called Abstract School of Bhopal and Indore. While he is very much a part of this school, he is also a kind of outsider. But this outsider tag adds to the significance of Manoj Kachangal’s work and endows it with a certain unique quality. His astonishing range of colours, the depth of his works, their complex abstract language with its origins in the magical landscape of Mandu (Madhya Pradesh), as well as his technical skill and inventiveness represented here must astonish even his keenest admirers. In the contemporary medium of acrylic, on both canvas and paper, Manoj Kachangal conveys the unremitting freshness of his vision. In his search he is always cleansing the mirror of perception.
In his language one can identify confidence and ease. The colours of his abstract works are so beautiful they startle us. W are surprised by their mythical beauty precisely because they are derived from everyday reality.
From the Curator’s Note: This exhibition is a milestone in the relatively short but nonetheless insightful career of a young artist. Nearly one hundred paintings, spanning more than a decade, are reproduced in this volume. Doors of Perception makes accessible the development of a young and gifted Painter of Madhya Pradesh, one of the trendsetters in the so-called Abstract School of Bhopal and Indore. While he is very much a part of this school, he is also a kind of outsider. But this outsider tag adds to the significance of Manoj Kachangal’s work and endows it with a certain unique quality. His astonishing range of colours, the depth of his works, their complex abstract language with its origins in the magical landscape of Mandu (Madhya Pradesh), as well as his technical skill and inventiveness represented here must astonish even his keenest admirers. In the contemporary medium of acrylic, on both canvas and paper, Manoj Kachangal conveys the unremitting freshness of his vision. In his search he is always cleansing the mirror of perception.
In his language one can identify confidence and ease. The colours of his abstract works are so beautiful they startle us. W are surprised by their mythical beauty precisely because they are derived from everyday reality.
