LOOKING AT A TREE, SEEING A FOREST: UMESH PK
August 14 - September 27 , 2025
In this new suite of paintings
that move from the panoramic to the granular, evocative of landscapes that
optically extend beyond, Umesh PK restores a sense of vitalism and enigma to a
genre that has historically stilled much of our pulsating, alive world. In
these paintings, each stroke gathers to announce a place that is resonant with
subductive currents and assertions of many atmospheres. Across the canvases,
which are allusive of but not indexical to sights seen, landscapes that are reassembled
from memory and thought erupt in choreographies of geologic life that seek
neither a spectator nor narrator but speak to the cosmos in the tongues of deep
time. Umesh PK’s method combines a devoted eye which draws on visions from what
he describes as a “deeper, archetypal layer of consciousness”. This eye senses the
visual multiplicity that marks every scale of life—from the tangled, muddy
roots forming imperceptible fractals, to the dappled plurality of a single leaf
through the passage of hours.
Umesh’s methodology of orienting
attention as a form of expansive seeing yields a vivid abundance, serving as a
visual compass that can submerge into the dense thickets rendered in minutiae,
or soar into the slants of light that graze the treetops. Here, Umesh
understands attention to be a force which “illuminates everything without
discrimination”, demanding that we resist the urge to lapse into a regimented
vision, seeing a tree as merely the aggregation of bark and leaves. In our conversations,
Umesh elaborates on the notion of sight as something that transforms the act of
seeing into a deepened relation with the world—such that these paintings
transcribe something that is both innate and imbued by the currents of a shared
world. Umesh describes the progression of the paintings as informed by the surfacing
of images, visuals from the depths of the psyche. This is the “archetypal
layer” as Umesh describes it, a space both personal and rooted in the
collective. In this orientation towards the collective, Umesh also found a
point of departure from painting scenes with human figures to landscapes that
are replete with natural forms that coil into one another, coagulate and curl
in relationships of indefinite entanglement and interdependency. Under Umesh’s
paintbrush, every part of the canvas holds multiplicity—there is an evocation
of forms without their dissipation into ideas. There is a durationality to this
attentive way of seeing, which Umesh draws from the works of philosopher J
Krishnamurti. It stays with and within the world of the ordinary
and seeks to grasp its wholeness, not by recreating what is seen but letting it
accumulate and emerge through the process of painting. This practice of
attention leads to various visual affects. In certain works, such as It
Flows Like Water (1), attention as both the act of seeing and as the
compass orienting the creative process, results in the shift from intention
to emergence—what begins as a painting on the devastation of the floods
in Kerala in 2018, finds itself giving way to overgrowth, a rapturous density,
making me wonder: Can paintings perform soliloquies, speaking to their own
ears, crafting their own stories?
In other places, the practice of
attention produces tremendous chromatic effects, such as in A Red Scar
(2025), where a crimson-scarlet flame spurts through the landscape, directing
our gaze both upwards and below, belying a closer look at what is possibly an
eruption or a cascade. A stream snakes through the foliage at the bottom of the
canvas, while a lone truck appears upwards as a minor figure, and we understand
the many incisions on this landscape, which is earth turned to silt and
mountains carved to lay concrete. In It Flows Like Water (2), a similar
shift in scales occur—from the gushing thrum of water flowing through a forest,
to the low hum of a truck moving along a road—simultaneously feeling out of
place and still the most ordinary sight. These planar juxtapositions require us
to bend and crick our necks, to move away and step closer to the canvas, to see
the whole and the part, to shuffle our ways of viewing. In these paintings,
every tendril, every branch demands the slowing of the eye, unfurling as it
does along human and geologic time. There is a staying of the eye, a
moment to pause and partake in each part of the canvas. In Drink the Light,
Be the Light (2025), a moment of immense quietude glimmers, as a deer bends
into a radial pool that casts a soft illumination on all that it touches. It is
possible to be drawn both into the divine light of this pool and to follow its
translucent veil on the landscape, and further thread the glimpses of a vivid
blue-black through the interlocked branches of trees. Where light evokes an
expansive luminosity, water in paintings such as Moving into its depths as
it revolves around a point (2025), is a metonym, evoking transience and a movement
inward. Umesh draws upon the spiritual connotations of the spiral as a contemplative
journey to the inner self, a route to self-knowledge. There are possibilities
to stir adrift in these paintings, wander from paths, and allow the gaze to become
riven.
In works that layer daubs of paint
as sedimentary deposits on the canvas, colour emerges as a protagonist to be
traced, embarking on journeys that meander with intent, treading new routes in
what appears to us initially as familiar scenes. In works of smaller scale,
form sublimates into abstraction, conveying the gesture of something that is
present instead of a representative image, a collection of sights and keen
sensing, what Umesh calls the result of “spontaneous seeing” and protracted
thinking on colour, translated in the language of paint. I think here of the prismatic river moving
through in It Flows Like Water (2), where the surface of water assumes a
glass-like quality, catching and refracting luminescence.
Umesh himself arrives at these
works through detours and stoppages—crossing over periods of debilitation and
convalescence to sustain the fundamental question confronting each artist: what
is the meaning behind making art, or what finds itself revealed in the
act of making art? Not anchored to a singular place, for Umesh, the works hold
an essential interpretive plurality, inviting viewers to dwell in the reservoirs
of their own memories and desires, partake in imaginative flights or return to
dream-states; these uncharted encounters are fundamental to how the works are
conceived, hoping to address each viewer through a confluence of ways of seeing.
The works range from small paintings to large canvases, prompting us to see
both the lush intricacy of the earth and the pictorial map of its many
lives—asking to shift our perspectives from the worm burrowed deep in the soil,
to the ascending bird. To look at these paintings today, as the result of
months condensing in the artist’s studio, is to enact a breach from the
dizzying vortex of digital time and influx of images that flit past and vanish
as quickly as they appear. These works invite a return, a circling from its
viewers, like seasons and the rivers.
In many ways, this series is an
invitation to practice close looking, implied in its title, and a form of
attentive co-presencing that Umesh extends to the world—drawing forth its
varied tenors. There is again a sense of duration to each work, nestled here
are markers of shifts—the vibrancy of monsoons and the caprice of floods in
Kerala. These events linger suggestively in the canvas, demanding an accordance
of time and co-presence from the viewer to discern the tenor of movements and
tremors that reside in each work. In Looking at a Tree, Seeing a Forest,
there is a return to thinking of the painter’s eye and the time that each
painting inaugurates, of worlds known and strange.
-Arushi Vats
Images
Installation
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