In folk tales and fairy tales, a forest of enchantments is called so for the curiosity it envelops and the mysteries it holds. For artist Paramjit Singh all of nature abounds in such liminality, whether apprehended through, a window, a midday walk or travels to cities abroad. ‘Nature teaches you to be a very free person,’ Singh says of his pastoral experiments. To distill the essence of his experiences Singh draws his compositions from memory, after entirely processing his observations and feelings to offer us a representational view of nature, replete with emotion, tactility, texture and most significantly, colour.
Featuring fifteen works rendered in oil on canvas, Spring Time, is a solo presentation that runs the gamut of Singh's quintessential explorations of nature but importantly moves his impressionist vocabulary into the realm of abstraction. Through abstraction, he departs from using nature as a stage or scene. Instead, using pigments as language, Singh captures the cyclical movements, instincts and persistence of nature to overwhelm and pacify the seeker or observer.
He weaves strokes in a vibrant palette, including both an unexpected white and a saturated pink, to articulate nature's own ecstasies. These large-scale works persuade us of the grandeur as well as the intimacy of nature, and become reminiscent of the spiritual encounters propelled by such interactive parlances. These harmonious composites argue the nature of nature as vast yet personable, asymmetrical yet balanced, returning us to Singh's fundamental belief in the human spirit's natural quest for freedom. His smaller and more subdued charcoal drawings offer another experience of nature and memory in light and shadow – in which lush forestation enfolds, suffuses, and transports.
Spring Time is a nostalgic yet hopeful new body of work by Paramjit Singh that brilliantly articulates the eternalness of nature in time as endurance, as memory and as visual storytelling.
