“There is no abstract art. You must always start with something. Afterward you can remove all traces of reality.” —Pablo Picasso

To celebrate Madras Week 2018, Forum Art Gallery invited artists N.S Manohar, and A.Viswam to present Chennai- centric subjects through figuration and abstraction respectively.  The topics chosen were, Mylapore, Marina and Traffic, all three providing a rich visual vocabulary for the artists to interpret.

The exhibition aims to stimulate the aesthetic experience of the viewer when both genres reflect a common theme yet the perceptions are varied. In the non verbal abstraction, the elements of colour, space, line and form used in isolation or combination or as metaphors gift the viewer with multiple interpretations. This is in direct contrast with the verbal stimuli received through knowledge from the literary content in figuration.

However, In the art world today, a dividing line between abstraction and figuration is much more porous, leading artists who engage in their respective genre to create artwork somewhere in between the two. 

This exhibition presents a dual emotion which evokes a reaction based on sense impressions provided by the common creative discourse.

Shalini Biswajit