Nature Morte is pleased to present a solo show of new paintings by Basist Kumar. This group of new works, created in the past year, exhibit Kumar’s extraordinary technical facility at handling paint, achieving results which mimic yet defy the limits of photography. In the process, he seems to combine multiple histories of landscape painting into a single canvas, drawing from his studies in both India and China, creating axioms that synthesize cultural paradigms.

Pure landscape painting, eschewing any man-made elements in its imagery, holds a greater regard in both China and Japan than India. A spiritual element is almost always present and this may come from the influence of the philosophies of Daoism, in China, and Zen Buddhism, in Japan. Mountains are the most common subject, seen as the homes of immortals and closer to heaven, this being an idea also prevalent in India. In the history of Western Art, landscape painting becomes empowered with Romanticism, at its height in the years 1800 to 1850 in Europe. This involved an idealization of wild nature and a suspicion of science and industrialization, intuition and emotion being preferred to the rationalization of the Enlightenment, which had come before. At the same time, landscape painting takes on the attributes of History Painting in the Americas, articulating the concept of Manifest Destiny as the Europeans conquer a new continent. Later, the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists use landscape painting as a support on which to deconstruct the very means of painting itself.

All of these references hover just below the sumptuous surfaces of Kumar’s works. We may easily be seduced by his ability to convey the visual apparitions of light on water, fog moving through a forest, or the first inklings of dawn on the horizon. But Kumar’s works can also be thought of as “inscapes,” a development of the genre associated with Surrealism, when the visible was used to represent the artist’s psyche as a kind of interior landscape. If the Romantic landscape sought to convey intense emotions, Kumar’s versions seem to embrace the noncommittal and unaccountable, immoral even. These landscapes are both and neither - real views or poetic constructions, pastoral ideals or exotic trances. Kumar’s paintings articulate our contemporary Age of Anxiety, with human progress caught on the precipice of its own destruction by way of its battles with Nature.
 

Basist Kumar (b. Jharkhand,1984) received his BFA in 2007 from the College of Art, Delhi University and his MFA in 2009 from the Vishwa-Bharati University, Santiniketan. Having been trained in the figurative school in India, a scholarship from the Ministry of Culture enabled him to study at the China Academy of Art in Hangzhou, China for two years (2013–15). Kumar has exhibited his work in several solo exhibitions, the latest one in 2018 titled Gazing at Realities at Nature Morte, New Delhi and Upcoming, Galleria Davide Gallo, Berlin. He has also exhibited works in group exhibitions at Nature Morte, New Delhi, India; Maya Art Space, Kolkata, India; Bose Pacia, Kolkata, India; and Davide Gallo Gallery, Berlin, Germany.