On Building a Tree: Arboreal Obsessions - Recent works by Maneesha Doshi

Can you build a tree? Is it a contradiction of terms? Maneesha Doshi’s recent works seem to embrace the logic of an oxymoron. Her meta-landscapes, hovering between the possible and the impossible, declare that they will occupy two modes of painting at once. One is more of a narrative order in which a story unfolds smoothly- the trees sway, the branches dance, leaves change colours and so on. And the other is about the verticals and the horizontals that hold a building in shape or can exist without any narrative element. Maneesha’s landscape series place themselves at the meeting point of these two axes. They let the crystalline and the organic intersect with strange inversions; a tree is built up branch by branch, while the walls wilt, staircases curve and the buildings loom indifferently, giving a way to the tentacles of the architecturally sturdy branches. It is in this in-between space that her new series of ‘tree-buildings’ appears to flourish. In the history of contemporary art in Baroda, grids and narratives as ways of seeing and painting have left behind an illustrious history. What pulls me to these series of paintings of “Inner Trees” is Maneesha’s bold mixing up of these modes of depiction achieved through haunting beauty and lyricism and her almost veiled invocation of these legacies.

If the foot of the trees were not tied to earth, they would be pursuing me. For I have blossomed so much, I am the envy of the gardens.
– Rumi

1. “Trees-Buildings”/ Inner Tree

What at first glance appears to be pleasing pictures of colourful trees and ashen buildings weave a strange narrative on a closer look. Clearly, the trees and the buildings are the main actors while the human figures get nudged into a shadowy presence. More accurately, the human figures of ambiguous gender lurk in the corners, decentred from the grander drama playing out between the energetic and blooming trees and the grey but strongly etched out architecture. Colour has a dramatic role to play but it remains confined to the domain of the ‘natural’ world that consists of the trees and the sky. Exuding an eerie whiteness, the buildings at times resemble greyish cement, moisture laden crumbling structures and occasionally even the skeletal structure of human bones. The trees have a vigour of vegetative life and a freshness of a newly erected wall, now standing turgid, now curving to occupy the building; often the branches splay out as fingers that even hold the grey buildings in place. It is this strange intermingling of the vegetative and the architectural that makes one wonder in terms of what came first: the cement structures or the energetic trees? Why should this question matter if what we see before us is a meta landscape as signified by the title chosen by the artist as “Inner tree”? If we follow the visual logic of these landscapes keenly, this question matters. The arrangement of the trees, their vivid but evocative colours and their curious probing of the building around which they twist and turn. Observing the interspaces between the trees and the buildings leads one to infer the precedence of the buildings to the trees. This is a strange inversion to what happens in the regular world of urban development: forests are cleared to make room for offices, malls and other buildings. Once the development spreads and consolidates, the plants and trees are brought back to obey the rationale of the built environment.

But these ‘Tree-buildings’ are not mirror reflections of an everyday life; they are like vegetative return of the repressed or invoke the poetic obsessions celebrated by Rumi, the Sufi poet. Why so many allusions to inversions, fixations and fascinations? They are ‘inner trees’ that grew out of exceptional circumstances, not the least being the pandemic of 2020 that had led to the temporary and unprecedented shutdown of the planet itself. The resultant lockdown had stimulated many artists across the world and impacted their creative expressions. So even if this global catastrophe will go down the history of mankind in terms of humungous losses, the artists seem to be specially wired to be drawing inspiration from even seemingly apocalyptic state of affairs. Maneesha’s response to the quarantine has been, in her words, “the lockdown meant spending a lot of time with myself.” This forced introspection seems to have compelled an inward gaze, triggering almost a Gauguin moment: Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? Unlike exploring a Tahitian landscape, the artist lets her imagination reinvent the prosaicness of the everyday with her arboreal obsessions; she plants her ‘magic-real’ trees that seem to then take over the rectilinear rationality of the built environment. Trees burst into the staid buildings and try to break out of the frame of the paintings. The nature-culture binary definitely tilts towards the world of trees for which only sky is the limit. Is the artist’s fixation on the trees an effect of the indoor seclusion of the lockdown? As many of us are witness to, the lockdown unfolded a unique scenario that periodically flashed on the television screens; animals and birds appearing in large numbers, flocking on the abandoned highways and the roads. This was the kind of ‘politics of nature’ that had warmed the cockles of many environmentalists’ hearts and the Anthropocene supporters—when the humans retreat, the nature opens up. Maneesha’s recent meta-scapes do reflect a luxuriant imagination at work at the time of constrictions: the plant world proliferates and occupies the abandoned buildings and rejoice at their own abundance.

Humanized trees also abound in Pahari miniatures. In Kangra paintings, as for example, the landscapes throb with desire and passionately take part in the emotive situations of the nayaka and the nayika’s immersion into Shringara or erotic rasa—the trees lean over, shower flowers on the hero and heroine and reflect the mood of the painting. Not over here. In this strange universe, the buildings pre-exist the trees and it is now time for the trees to take over the architecture, penetrating the walls and occupying it compellingly. It is the vivacity of the trees and their pre-eminence that lend these paintings their arresting and haunting quality, quite reminiscent of the trees painted by the Mughal artist, Mansur. As the artist muses- “like with the squirrels, you discover the trees. You see the trees from many angles.” Such are Maneesha’s arboreal obsessions that surpass the human lens and appear to be a prelude to a post-humanistic landscape; a landscape in which the humans are an afterthought, often reduced to puny little space fillers or punctuation marks in the more serious conversations between the trees and the buildings. In fact, the presence or the absence of these shadowy figures is inconsequential to the narrative of nature.

2. Are these works just an outburst of ‘inner trees’ created by an obsessive pictorial imagination or do her earlier works prepare us for this shift?

In fact, these arboreal meta-scapes appear in an inverted relationship with the earlier set of works entitled Innate Coronation (2018-19), works that apparently resemble “portraits”. They are not paintings as such but painted cut-outs involving a different process: a drawing first gets transferred on to a MDF board which is shaped through a CNC machine. Each of the cut-outs carry within them the hollowed-out bits that let the environment around them flow through these paintings. Conventionally, portraits as a genre are mean to be a site of human subjectivity. But in these painted cut-outs, the genre of portraiture and its centrality as a prime site of selfhood appears to be cancelled out; or rather, the human faces turn into instruments. They are hollowed out of subjectivity to become holders of a paraphernalia of strange objects, piled on the top of the other. It is as if human heads are dethroned into being mere bhara vahakas or carriers of weight, often seen in early Indian caves and temples. These heads lend themselves to allegories invoking Egyptian cartouches; often, they are more like balancing heads that take on the burden of past legacies, memories that harden as hieroglyphics. In the House of Infinity series (2019-2020), the paintings appear to be a cross between Tarot cards and Egyptian pictograms. Even if the organic and the inorganic combine, the resultant shapes veer towards the diagrammatic.

If we glance backwards further to her earlier works from 2006-7, the allegories take over and overwhelm the narratives (“Ocean Stories”). Androgynous figure glide across the skies riding birds or taking on their attributes. A subtext of the divine enters them and almost lend them a semi religious aura. Take as for example, “Rain Goddess,” from this series, where the two systems of representations I had alluded to before, are juxtaposed: the amorphous, edge less, cascading clouds take over the space. Right in the middle of such a cosmic formation, there is an open air geometric pavilion that tries to thrive amidst swirling clouds. However, the enclosed rectangular space fails to keep out the clouds which surround the reclining, genderless figure. The outside seeps into the interior. The seepage continues between the humans and the birds and their attributes get exchanged. Humans have wings just as the birds’ wings mimic the human arms and the role playing across the species boundary continue endlessly.

On the other hand, the arboreal ‘Inner Tree’ series that we see in her latest series enact a different drama of the elements: both the buildings and nature appear to intermingle in a strange choreographed spectacle- they interpenetrate but lyrically. Why do I halt at the term “lyrically”? Lyricism has acquired such a loaded connotation in the contemporary art discourse and is often resisted for its gender implications-its association with beauty, decoration and delicacy. Many a male critic has shied away from using it for describing women artists’ works fearing a disservice to the cause of women artists. But what is wrong with lyricism or the lyrical which does, in the case of Maneesha’s recent works, shade off into the surreal or magic realism? It implies a certain aesthetics, a joyous celebration of beauty. This term can be recouped unapologetically if by this term one implies the artist’s play with the frame, now narrative, now grid like. In fact, lyricism here becomes a means, a strategy, a ploy for creating a subtle drama across the tree-building binary. In the splaying of the branches, in their grasping of the buildings, there is an aesthetics of care, of intimacy but without the human intervention. Or more accurately, the humans have a lazy presence; at best, they strike indolent postures or have a vanishing presence. Humans are reduced to being inconsequential witness to the elementary drama between the trees and the buildings.

3. The Painted Cut-outs

Moving in quite a different register are the painted cut-outs displayed in the show. The studied contrast and interplay between architectonic with the organic now gets played out between the painted patterns on shaped surface and the “real” captured by the gaps and the hole inside these cut-outs. Some are to be hung on the walls while others meant to be propped up on pedestal like stands. The more painterly wall cut-outs have been painted with broad sweeping lines and patterns that play with the shadows whereas those placed on the pedestals approximate sculpture, meant to be viewed from both sides. In both the cases, the play with patterns and the frame resonate with modernist abstractions and they seem to stage an interplay between the negative and positive patterns, one mirroring the other playfully across the same surface. Either way, the cut-outs explore the opposites- of literally breaking the form by shadows or holes but this seeming ‘iconoclasm’ seldom loses the site of lyricism, which here takes the shape of the ornamental, the use of patterns, repetitions and a deliberate play with the edge of the cut-outs.

It is the motif of the bird on these cut outs, both within their frame as well as in form of its outline that alludes to modernist architecture. I recall my experience of walking along the brutalist architecture at Chandigarh designed by the celebrated French architect, Le Corbusier. While being immersed in this city’s aesthetic of bare concrete, brick and wood, you look up and find your gaze arrested by “Open Hand monument” that marks the skyline of the Capitol Complex. Nothing in the city plan of the government buildings prepare you for this brush with the organic, the decorative and the lyrical! It is this leitmotif of the bird, both as an image within the frame as well as a means of contouring the shape of these cut-outs that lead you to certain modernist aesthetics. Lurking beneath Maneesha’s ornithological imagination is not just its inspiration from the French architect’s designs. The motif of Corbusier’s enormous open hand that doubles up as a flying bird seems to betray the underside of the modernist obsession with the figure of the grid. Perhaps, at the heart of the rectilinear architecture and its rigorous rationality lay the predilections for the organic, the ornamental and even the lyrical!

--- Parul Dave Mukherji, October 2022.

Recent works by Maneesha Doshi

The visage is the portal to identity. In Maneesha Doshi’s latest body of work, the artist focuses on head studies of fantasy beings, whose inner world is revealed to us through the headgear that they are adorned with. Their faces are often androgynous and their frontal gaze, confront the viewer. Yet they appear to be looking within. This duality is peculiar to most of Maneesha’s work for while the world created by her through her paintings is corporeal and organic it is also spiritual and ethereal. The world of trees, flowers, still-life and mountains, merge with that of architecture and concrete. These worlds are unified through Doshi’s painterly intervention where all aspects of humanity and nature bound together by a general sense of love and self-discovery.

Headgear is usually worn by kings and those belonging to tribes, observes Doshi, however these beings belong to contemporary times, even while they are drawn from various historical references. In Doshi’s world they perform multiple roles and purposes. Historically, the wearing of headgear has been attributed to various reasons, for protection, fashion, disguise, entertainment, religion, medicine, decoration or even distinction. Under Doshi’s hands the headgear becomes an extension of the wearer’s personality, their world both physical and mental and an aura of their existence.

In Maneesha's work there is a sense of the local and that which is particular to inherent culture and yet there are aspects of the universal that pervades the works of the entire family. What is perhaps most striking about this artistic family is that while they share a common ethos, they all have a unique and individual approach in which they express themselves.

Maneesha does not ponder whether her work is to be categorized as Indian or contemporary whether it is current or historical before she begins to paint. That is perhaps because her work is enmeshed with several vignettes of the contemporary, certain underpinnings of the historical, positive realms of spirituality and tones that are deeply earthy, worldbound and yet inherently Indian. One may see these aspects coming together innately in her work that is characterized by its own internal lyricism and rhythm.

Maneesha’s works do display the frontality of Byzantine and early Greco Roman painting where their direct gaze is intended to engage the devotee. It has been historically documented that the icons were designed for devotional purposes and to help people better understand the figures they prayed to thus bridging the ‘gap’ between the divine and humanity.

It has also been observed that in her work the resonance of the object often ‘moves’ to the human body. In this instance however the objects, the containers and the human head-study have melded together in a continuity that unifies them and brings them into a cryptic dialogue with each other. It is never a direct symbolism that may be read simply but a layering of complex identities, thoughts, objects and intuitions that completes the persona of these protagonists.

Another interesting aspect to be noted is that in this series Maneesha has rendered her painterly expressions upon a traditional two-dimensional surface like, canvas, board or paper, as well as included a sculptural, third dimensional aspect in her work. Creating large cut-outs fashioned out of canvas on MDF waterproof, she has painted upon them including aspects of their physical qualities like circular shaped voids and cutouts. The surface becomes enlivened, textural and reaches out beyond the typical two-dimensionality of the painted surface that is employed to create optical illusions, perspective or ‘depth’ in two-dimensional works.

The idea behind moving to work on the cutout was to break away from the conventional idea of the frame. Hence Maneesha started with small shaped cut-outs which in a way brought in certain depth and shadows and added an element of surprise. The smaller works led to larger freestanding cut-outs, which add a sculptural element to the painting.

For a painter this might be a slightly unconventional use of implements to push her artistic language even further. It may be observed in the composition, that the human visage remains at the center of the composition while Maneesha has rendered the headgear through a strategic use of voids and presences, outlining a human shape that stands spectrally as a mute observer or a statuesque piece of architecture. Viewers and fellow artists who are familiar with Maneesha’s work can easily observe the melding of human forms with edifice, or where plant and animals merge into one body, since that is characteristic of her style. In the Later Renaissance period the development of a genre titled “monumental still life,” showcased a grand coming together of objects both alive and still-life and it is perhaps a subconscious exposure to this great union of forms that Maneesha is tapping into.

In her previous exhibition, where she has referenced the body to the city, she drews it out to the point where the body ‘became’ the city, taking on aspects of its transport, light and architecture. In this body of work Maneesha has moved on to the head and its study, transferring aspects of the city and objects to the visage.

This incongruent merging of forms may be observed in these earlier paintings. In the instances of the head gears, one observes the edifice merging with a water-pot, a vase, a crown, a holy candle, a set of sharp knives, an animal or a supine form, which is often loaded with the iconography of early Egyptian art.

Finally, one must engage with and appreciate these wearers of the headgear to understand them within the aspects of selfhood. While they reflect society, they also signify the self, as they speak for the universe, they likewise murmur for the individual, while they celebrate and conquer, they are also reflective and introspective. Their multiplicity and cultural richness are indeed a lot to collect and ponder over and contemplate.

--- Georgina Maddox, Independent Critic-Curator, New Delhi. Winter, January 2020.

The agency of journey evokes complex layers of thoughts and associations in the Indian subcontinent – from philosophic metaphysical interpretation to concrete and tangible manifestations. It is within these veneers and layers, that Manessha appears to reside her works and ruminations. Gathering centuries of such an engagement is a complex and has implied a back forth negotiation in Maneesha process.

For a long period since the 1960’s, more-so, after the narrative movement emerged in Baroda, there was a tactic need to affirm to theoretical structures of expression. However, over the last decade, artists have recognized that such domains have vanished in a dynamic juxtaposition of myriad realities, in the banal process of what is often called globalization. For Maneesha, who has had a trajectory of residing in the in-between thresholds and peripheries, an intuitive search for the resonance of the landscape within, has been unfolding over time. Beginning with flora, fauna, city and human body, as carriers of a benign inner life-force, probably drawn from a Jaina ethos, Maneesha’s work continues to immerse itself in the thresholds of the contained and the carrier – be it animal, thing, body, city or transport. A sense of primitive and directness lend the process, the ambivalence of embodying several interpretations simultaneously.

The resonance of container can manifest as the human body, the city or constructed space or in her recent works, the vehicle. The paradox is negotiated by apparently static, calm images engaged in dynamic restless inner discourses – the unconventional and radical presenting themselves in familiar poise. It is this inversion and transposition of calmness and restless, of stasis and movement, of familiar and radical, that evokes questions of life within and around us. The series appears to conjure a sense of ritual formed out of habitation. The centrality of the lampstand carries its own embodied meanings across time. The unstated conveys another meaning from what is ostensibly witnessed in this ritual – Attachment, relationship with sources in nature. Through this direct from of drawing, the notion of location and time is dissolved, only to reappear in the act of viewing, through a mnemonic process in the voyeuristic viewer, of memory and recall and reconjuring.

Nature emerges in tis different manifestations, or rather elements of nature, often placed in an uncertain visual context, in relation to the vehicle. Is the vehicle or container an intrinsic part of the contained? Is nature an inseparable element of the journey? Elements arrange themselves in uncertain ways, in Maneesha’s work. The lightness of a heavy mountain toposcape, the floating tree concealing its roots, an unseen horizon, in a certain way reconnect with the movement of journey, marking notional stations. The dichotomy of contained and container, and its growing relationship often raises the problematic, of what is the contained moment. A photographic representation captures the moment, however, what is unseen, yet intuitively sensed, is a repository of memories and experiences, both real and mythic. The past constantly confronts the possibilities of the future in the moment residing in the present.

Strangely, luminosity needs shadows. Shadows too contain memories. However, the displaced shadows belie the presence of light, giving them their own presence and the notion of another self, in an unknown realm. In a certain sense, the wash of colors overlaying ore-existing images on the canvas create another layer, like an amnesia created by the passage of time. The act of forgetting appears as essential as that of remembering, as Time negotiates its journey through phenomena of different nature – real, memory, myth, and the imaginary.

The 3 elements constitute the reference of the manifest – earth and water, horizon and sky. ‘Luminous Journeys’ appears to dissolve them, unify them, separate and deny their existence in the mind space, even as it reinforces their ephemeral presence. The problematic themes of contemporary existence reveal themselves in the moving stairway that appears light and temporary in a vehicle even as it denotes an incidental connection between ground and sky.

‘Luminous Journeys’ both conjure and lighten the space around them, with an open-ended weave of imaginations ‘as the protagonist’. It creates an inner universe, which in a sense is both distant, yet connected with the happenings of the world around. These works reflect a personal journey through the imaginary of ‘landscapes through a vehicle’ – one apparently stable and static while the other ostensibly moving. The mythical imagination traverses Landscapes and Memories and myth and the life that inhabits them. Even as there is a meticulous-ness in recording the detail, its manifestation is illusory and connects its images to familiar events, though in non-real relationships. The cow travelling in a truck brings myriad intuitive images and associations of reality and fantasy, and duality of history and the present. Maneesha intuitively projects the ephemeral, through more precise objects like car, autorickshaw, truck, or boat and even unknown moving vehicles.

While ostensibly pacing objects, with animal, bird, tree or automobile, the works reveal a search of relationship and human experiences, rather than the forms themselves. The transparency of the revealed forms and their tentative locations in an undefined space, lend them a sense of the ‘sacred’ that tries to transcend specific contexts. The notion of worship or ritual, the feminine personifying goddess, the sacred grove – each bring in their own mnemonic references from a historic past, which merge with a contemporaneous negotiation. To bring these in direct juxtaposition with socio-political notions of feminist expression would spur a complex discourse on the expression of justice, equity, liberation, and freedom. The body and vehicle are brought in direct relationship with elements of nature, be it tree, sky or earth. This strange agency of separation and inter-dependence reveal the playful and spontaneous. Al another realm, memories express themselves in the elements of form. The vehicle itself becomes a mnemonic device, recalling diverse memories of an open-ended journey.

--- Durganand Balsavar

The City Beside Me

Who is the third who always walks beside you? When I count, there are only you and I together. But when I look ahead up the white road there is always another one walking beside you gliding wrapt in a brown mantle, hooded I do not know whether a man or a woman – But who is that on the other side of you?
-- From The Wasteland by T S Eliot

Even though it is now fashionable to call ourselves global citizens, our umbilical cords often tie us down to a lane, a village, a town, a city where we were born, or where we spent our childhood or our youth, and with which are associated our happiest memories; and then, as grow older, the cities where we work and become our karmabhoomi, where we raise our families, and ultimately, where we retire to, also becomes home. These various places which are our ‘homes’ at various times populate the emotional / spiritual baggage of fond / not-so-fond memories we carry with ourselves as we move like itinerant travellers through life.

Meneesha Doshi’s recent body of paintings explores the idea of how our memories of cities / places always remain, consciously or unconsciously, with each of us, in significant and insignificant ways. In her paintings these memories are transformed and become embedded as an integral part of a person’s clothing, or his / her actual physical extension such as the torso and the limbs, skin and nails. Since places are generally remembered from the architecture that marks them, buildings, monuments, and natural structures play an important role as images in paintings.

The germ of this idea came to Maneesha from a Simone Martini painting, the reproduction of which has been physically present in her working environment. A couple of works, (Desert Travellers, Moving Cities) in the present show are like tributes to Martini, with the image of the ancient traveller on the horse whose elaborate costumes here weave the memories of remembered cities in their warp and weft, as they reappear in Maneesha’s works.

But that germ of an idea really hatches, evolves, bloom and flowers in the 12 large water colours on paper that are the backbone of this show. The materiality of the medium (paper and water colours), the choice of pastels as the colour palette and the centralization of the image with no visual distractions in the periphery, are three preferences of the artist that she has been able to work out with skill and maturity. Exploring the theme with a number of interesting visual variations and possibilities. The city is depicted as an envelope, for instance, blanketing the figure against the misfortune of homelessness; or as an overcoat that engulfs the figure but also opens up windows and doors on the figure’s torso, raising issues of private / public space, or then, draped as a long, trailing stole, gathering memories from the dust below the feet as the figure moves on. In a couple of works, the figures appear to pose like a fashion mannequin, showing off the ‘built-environment’ encrusted on clothes, where the figure is no more than the rights-sized hanger for the burden of the clothing.

When the city is not externalized as a piece of clothing, it is internalized in the sense of the body as landscape. In one smaller work, the figure is lying prone much in the likeness of a Sheshashayee Vishnu as the city is mapped about the geography of the body. In many other works, especially the smaller acrylic on canvases, body parts such as a cascade of raven-toned hair, a soft palm, long fingernails, the arms and the legs, become the medium on which the architecture of the city imprints itself. Also, the body may not always be the human one. In Hill Town, the camel’s hump alternates as a hilly terrain on which a settlement is situated.

If these are visual expressions / explorations of deep and complex relationships that people have with places to which they may be spiritually or materially connected, there are also works that explore the impressions that the artist herself has garnered from her visits to historically / architecturally significant places in Europe – Gaudi’s Barcelona, the amazing ancient architecture of Cappadocia in Turkey, the island of Santorini in the Aegean Sea. Manessha is able to re-visit her experience of these places not merely in the form of a traveller’s documentation (‘been there, done that’) but is able to transmit the sense of wonderment as well as involvement its architectural heritage. Finally, the genes are showing up!

--- Sandhya Bordewekar, Baroda, October 1, 2010.

Any definition of contemporary art must include the understanding that it is a form of communication that delivers the artist’s understanding of existence and includes limitless implementations of individuality. Meneesha too is one such artist for whim her art has become a means to communicate personal ideologies and spiritual themes through the visual elements she places onto her canvas.

Born in the 1960s, not only would Maneesha have in all certainly grown up in the decade of feminism, the 1970s, and so perhaps unable to avoid the societal influences that shaped her in some manner, but also when studying her works, the interconnection between a contemporary woman artist and her view of the feminine form cannot be overlooked.

If one were to consider Maneesha’s works in this perspective, then one would have to acknowledge that they immediately reveal the difference between the feminist and the feminine. Instead of relying on the essentialist notions of the binary man or woman or on biologically-based physical differences and more importantly, even on the sociological differences rather, through symbolic narrative, her works bring out the culturally feminine traits, such as, interdependence, nature, tranquillity, body, emotion, immanence and creation.

Allegorical representations of the woman as a deity give rise to a pantheon of Goddesses in Maneesha glorifies the feminine by realising it to the level of divinity. She further places them in classical themes against monumental mythological backdrops, decorated with devotional motifs, such as flower garlands and lighted lamps in temple-like sanctums. The winged Goddess moving an entire mountain city is an easy recall of Hanuman. The mythological idea of female beauty and the purity of a union between a man and a woman is brought about by the ‘Epic Bird’, where the giant eagle, the Garuda, resting lightly on a delicate lotus, holds the masculine Vishnu and the lissom Lakshmi in an embrace on a bed of lotus flowers – the lotus being the symbol of both purity and original creation, Vishnu, a Purushottam, and ideal man, and Lakshmi, the Goddess of beauty.

These celestial beings are in complete harmony with the elements of nature they symbolize. The Tree Goddess sits in her adobe of the tree trunk with her feet rooted firmly to the ground and her arms creating the branches. The Sky Goddess floats in a chariot invisibly being pulled thought the sky, the Rain Goddess lies on a cloud within a swirling, dark thunderous cloud, and the Fire Goddess moves in a flame-like manner within a fire, while a rosy-link, winged Love Goddess is being saluted by various animals with pink hearts.

Meneesha ingeniously bypasses the classic feminist issues of equality and social justice simply by depicting women in ideal, mythical forms. She vests in them a divine power where they are in direct engagement with the natural elements of their concern. As such, in contrast with other women artist of her time, there is neither the idea of feminine dominance nor feminine vulnerability in her works.

Nature further plays an extremely significant role in Maneesha’s works. There is a harmonious distillation of formal elements of human and animal forms with nature, to the extent that almost a hybrid form combining the two is created. Human figures are intermingled with the form of a bird as they take flight lessons; wings are wrapped around human torsos as the two figures raise them towards the sky; the two boys weave stories, transforming their bodies into the elements of animal and nature as their tales progress.

Maneesha also achieves a refinement of intellectual expression through carefully mediated, flat compositions and simplified conceptions of forms. While there may be layers of meanings in each frame, each artwork is given an immensely appealing treatment, with a story-book feel. Her figures are delineated with the fluid calm of the yogic body; artistic and imaginative freedom in bringing forth personal ideologies are used with a graceful ease; and her palette of soft colours gives her paintings a feeling of gauzy lightness, infusing them with serenity, lyricism and fantasy.

Everything considered, Mannesha is an artist who has fused her mythological and feminine ideologies, the two themes that have made the deepest impact on art throughout history, so flawlessly that it seems effortless for her viewers to experience the same passion, inspiration and spirituality felt by the artist herself during the creation of each piece-and such an accomplishments, by definition, the origin and purpose of art.

--- Curated Hema Singh and Priya Pall

There are many stands that come together in the life of Maneesha that gives meaning to her art. A childhood which intertwined aesthetic influences of modernism with tradition, she was privy to a world of vast influences mainly from the closeness of her relationship with her architect father. A child of whimsy she has always followed her heart, creating a journey for herself that does not subscribe to the mappings of other artists of her age. Continuously painting from a very young age, she made this visual communication a subtext to her existence, and it is this that I find interesting about her as an artist and which is the peg upon which hangs the substance of her art practice.

If one was to historically place her within a time-line of her own contemporaries, Maneesha does not fit comfortably into any of the discourses of her time. But that is perhaps because on is looking to place ideological or structured frameworks as the point of reference to understanding her work. If one were to look beyond the beguiling serenity that one associates with the artist’s temperament, one would in fact encounter a fierce and almost wilful spirit, which is pivotal to her construction of self-identity. In this she unconsciously wears a feminist garb as she topples the prerequisite norms that define the role of the female artist today, thereby reinforcing the feminist precincts that hold choice as a basic prerogative to self-determination.

She dignifies the role of mother, wife, daughter, sister or friend as she places supreme the idea of humanness as being the essential core to her life. In these multiple roles of human interaction, she imposes her observations that she takes from her teachings of Jainism, and holds sacred the simple aspects of life, investing meaning in the subordinate, elevating the mundane. Living out the routine of her art into this order where it exists without conflict.

The spontaneity with which she works allows her to build a vocabulary of images that are not unlike the innovations of a musician with a raga. She delights in the playfulness that animals and nature offer her, and she couples this with human figure to make for internal landscapes that reflect the fables of her life as she lives each day.

She is not an artist who uses references as quotations in her work yet the influences of art history and her exposures through travel are nuanced in her love of primitive and naïve art, and which inform her sensibility.

She has a simple approach to the making of an artwork. It is a process of letting her imagination dictate as she designs the arrangement of forms to come together in open-ended ways; thereby letting you the viewer bring meaning to it form the way it suggests associations to you. This abandonment of imposing specific meaning provides a therapeutic catharsis for the artist. She frees herself from the burdens of designated content and the work becomes a continuous stream of consciousness. Heightened in the work are the elements of joy and celebration.

Particular to her watercolours are the spatial illusions that take your eye beyond the edge of the painting. One’s vision often travels to rest in the next frame of work, seaming them together and corroborating the artists methodology of her inner world unfolding itself through the daily process of living, creating a template for each body of work she creates. The size of her work provides her the portability to set up studio anywhere and the mobility to keep her world of art within her arms reach.

In an ear of issue-based art, Maneesha sets herself apart with no apology to reclaim the ideas of self-delight and enjoyment infusing her art practice. Perhaps it is refreshing that the primal forces that prompt image making are not entirely lost in this complex world we live in today where simple equations have become suspect, more often than not. Maneesha reintroduces us to the delights of the chanced upon, where myth and fantasy hold the mirror of our inner worlds, fleshing out same vivid truths that fold themselves into the seemingly playful parables she paints. In her fourth decade Maneesha acknowledges the holistic nature of her life and all the tributaries that feed and nature her existence and as a consequence, her art. The work we see today is derived from this understanding of herself and her comfort with her premises as an artist.

--- Rekha Rodwittiya