Curiously, the caricature-ish figures of Dhanur Goyal aren’t laced with humour. Folk-ish and cartoonish, they instead delve into the complex issues of mind. In artist Dhanur Goyal’s own words it explores the changing mental landscape of the human mind. Dhanur’s playful figures are placed against the backdrop of landscape where they seem to be forever in motion. “It’s a journey through different emotions that we human beings feel in different situations and circumstances,” says Dhanur Goyal of his latest collection titled ‘Lost in Motion’ currently on at Visual Arts Gallery in India Habitat Centre.
His neatly delineated figures evoke the flux, the chaos, and myriad other feelings and reactions humans face in their daily lives. The elegance and poise the figures possess is hard to miss and irrespective of their scale and relation to the backdrop, they never fall short on finish. The rock solid lines have been drawn with mastery and confidence with Rotring pen, Dhanur’s favourite and constant medium. A self-taught artist, he grew up watching his art teacher mom and drawing. The passion for drawing never freed him and Dhanur kept pursuing the medium. Even though the Rotring comes in the way of spontaneity — that a drawing so need — because drawing with Rotring one can only move in one direction, the artist hasn’t let his love diminish for it. “I love the feel of the Rotring pen,” says Dhanur, who is showing 41 works — pen and ink on paper. “While the texturing is with ink, the details, the drawing is done in Rotring. Rotring just works like a colour palette, any depth, any colour you want it is there except that it only moves in one direction. If it’s left then it’s left. You can’t take it up and down, this side and that side.”
Dhanur had his last solo ‘Losing Sight of Perspective’ with Gallery Ragini in 2012. “It was more in the realm of abstract. The 2007 show was figures and abstraction, 2010 was just faces and here again the effort is to amalgamate everything in symphony. The subject matter of human mind should just come together with landscapes and figures.”
(The exhibition presented by Gallery Ragini is on at Visual Arts Gallery till January 11)
