What strikes you most about Hari Srinivas’s work is his choice of colours. The vibrant hues spread across the canvas will take your mind into a journey towards the abstract. Hari’s style cannot be defined into one. In myriad ways, he experiments with his observations and puts colour into them.
He deals with impressionistic work— where short, thick strokes of paint are used to quickly capture the essence of the subject, rather than its details. The construction workers, a view of the park and the mellow scene in a bar, explore the subject from a distance and there is an emphasis on the larger picture than on the nitty-gritty’s of the subject. The European women on two bicycles in one of his paintings in an impressionistic style, draws from Claude Monet’s Le Printemps (Springtime).
Hari has brought the usage of a strong and flat brush from the European styles into his works. His works dabble with abstract subjects and yet through his colour schemes and volumes, the subjects emerge— clear and crisp. His free-flowing forms ooze energy and fervour. The fuchsias, parrot greens and bright blues, lend the images, a certain sense of freedom.
Hari Srinivas’s paintings derive greatly from his observations. Most of his works have come out of his trips to various countries. His abstract portraits of West Indian men, sparkle with Rastafarian colour schemes, he makes use of the bright greens, yellows and oranges and reds. The most distinct feature in these portraits is the treatment given to the eyes— they stand out bright, filled with emotion and almost real.
His series on Woman, is a take-off on the cubist art movement— where the subject or the object in question is broken up and assembled again to form a figure with a multitude of viewpoints. The paintings depict bare women, without emphasising on the imperfections of the body, but through colour and contrast, convey a message of liberation. Hari believes that the paintings should stand alone, irrespective of the technique used in its production.
The paintings are on view till December 5 at Muse Art Gallery at the Marriot Courtyard.
