Painter and installation artist Kartik Sood—he lives and works between Green Park, Delhi and Shimla, Himachal Pradesh—took to art at a young age. “I have been drawing since I was very young. That was my way of connecting with the outside world,” shares the 35-year-old artist.
On view till March 26 at the Talwar Gallery, New Delhi, Neeti Bagh, Sood’s current exhibition—it was unveiled on October 22 last year—is a series of his artworks created over the course of four years. The curation features oil and watercolour paintings along with video installations; these works represent the unpredictability of human life.
His upbringing in the hills of Shimla, has imparted to Sood’s work a distinct imagery of his interaction with the mountains as well as the “purity of colour” that appears when the fog disappears. “The mountains are deep in my psyche. Whenever I try to express something deeply, the visual sensation is correlated to my upbringing [in Himachal]. It has become part of my being,” shares Sood.
Titled ‘In Thin Air’, his works probe deep into the concept that “everything is fluid and gently floating around”. “While we keep following the same routine of everyday life, life just slips by. I want to break away from that, and my art attempts to do exactly the same,” explains Sood. A supporter of childlike creativity, which he believes that humans lose once they grow up, the artist hopes that his works are interpreted by his viewers as creatively as possible.
The puzzling human state
While the works in themselves do not follow a specific narrative, a sole character is always at the centre of Sood’s creation. The personality—a traveller or a person waiting in quiet contemplation—is a metaphorical representation of emotions and instances that make up a person’s life. “It is all very fluid. You see people around you with stories, experiences, and relationships to the world, and you relate to them in the moment,” says the 35-year-old artist. What becomes fascinating about each of these carefully-constructed artworks are the number of different stories that lurk under every layer.
Offering a surrealist set of landscapes, these works are, in a sense, reviews the “complexity of lived experiences”. Exploring everyday life around him, Sood tries to unearth the unseen or the half-seen from the mesh of reality. As he explains, “The visuals are about creating a barrier between our dreams and what is real. It is a barrier of belief structures and constant thoughts. I am trying to enter a dream-like state through my images.”
Breaking away from the linearity and continuity of narrative, Sood’s works cannot be categorised into any specific art genre. Knitting tales of many in one work, his end-product, therefore, is sort of an enigma involving the viewer and the world around.