Transcending the Popular:Paintings of P.R. Narvekar

The paintings of the eminent artist from Mumbai P.R.Narvekar, will be exhibited at Aakriti Art Gallery. His long struggle to build up a form containing his own identity, exemplify how assimilation of tradition with universal values can find an aesthetic resurrection and uplift the local to the level of global. At a certain level of his career he could realize that apart from creating narratives and describing the here and now reality a major function of the artist lies in creating an essential form that quintessentially grows from the inner consciousness and subconscious of the artist, which is a concentrated darkness containing the subtle light of the prolonged past of the humanity. The uniqueness of such ‘form’ along with unveiling of the inner being of the artist enlightens a community-oriented identity that acts as a bridge between national and international ideals of beauty, transforms the local into global. This is what the great artists of the world from Matisse to Modigliani, from Abanindranath Tagore to Jamini Roy did and thus enlightens the human civilization by unfolding its inner essence. Narvekar’s art has a similar lineage of extracting the sonorous beauty from the darkened reality all around. All his paintings in this show are figurative and human based. He distorts or transforms the figure rhythmically, rather extracts rhythm from the essence of civilization and induces it within the human figures so that these resonate with an inner harmony. The harmonious transformation of human figures is the essence of Narvekar’s art.