Here is an artist who deals with hip, timely, urban, and highly politicized themes in a way that is also visually engaging.  Wow!  Meet Gigi Scaria…if you don’t already know him.  This Delhi-based, Kerala born artist has been making a splash in the last few years with recognition around the world for his work in just about every medium.  Though he was trained in painting, some of his strongest work has taken the form of video or installation projects.

The most recent show at Chemold Prescott Road takes Scaria back to his painterly roots.  The exhibition, entitled “Amusement Park” is significantly more politically subtle than some of the artist’s earlier works, such as “Keep Delhi Clean,” a 2006 acrylic that features a silhouette of the Delhi city limits articulated by a thick brick wall that preserves the pristine white geographical interior from the encroachment of densely drawn urban chaos that sprawls from to the edges of the canvas.  Yet Chemold’s “Amusement Park” is not all fun and games.  Scaria writes: “’Amusement Park’ is a logical extension of an urban romanticism.  Here in this park they crawled, flew, fell and screamed with a momentary transcendence of the self.  A self never returned to its original self ever.”  Hence the theme is revealed as the explication of sickly-sweet urban excess.

The technical treatment of the subject, however, is anything but lush or frivolous.  The paint is laid down solid and flat, robbing figures and objects of movement or the promise of a third dimension.  “See-Saw” shows a pair of building balancing on either end of a wooden plank.  There is a flat brown ground, and a wallpaper-like backdrop of what looks to be buildings but could just as easily be fish scales close-up.  The treatment is not unlike that of Magritte, whose dully-modeled subjects give way to compositions of similarly bizarre whimsy.

The overwhelming flatness of the photographs is even more unnerving.  “Wheel” is a picture of a constructed (cardboard?  wood?) Ferris wheel with what looks to be miniature condos hanging where people’s seats would conventionally swing.  The simple but evidently expertly engineered construction is framed by a uniform gravel ground, stout ribbon of greenery, and a thin line of “real” apartment complexes in the distance that line up flawlessly with the “miniature” buildings hanging from the wheel.

But my favorite work “Wanderer Above the Sea” ends up, perhaps unintentionally, being beautiful.  A small figure stands facing away from the viewer on a cliff overlooking waves upon waves of buildings below—an unabashed quotation of Friedrich’s infamous “Wanderer above the Sea of Fog.”  Is this work intended as a cynical refrain to the climax of 19th century romanticism?  To my eyes it rather romanticizes the ubiquitous urban jungle of the 21st century.

-- Sophia Powers, Artslant International Editor, India

(Images, top to bottom: Gigi Scaria, Boat; Gigi Scaria, See-Saw; Gigi Scaria, Wheel; Gigi Scaria Wanderer Above the Sea.  Images courtesy of the artist and Cemold Prescott Road)