Eight artists - Archna Singh, Ankur Rana, Sourabh Mazumdar, Sonia Sareen, Manish Barodia, Amit Bhatia, Sudamini Mishra and Kamar Alam - have put together an exhibition at the Alliance Francaise here titled "Romanticists."
Capturing their thoughts in camera, on canvas and on metal, the artists say they want to see the world changing from social media etc to other life media - the uncontrollable power, unpredictability, and potential for cataclysmic extremes - an alternative to the ordered world of enlightenment of thought.
"My works are a tableaux of a fundamental human longing- that of money, a need that when exaggerated becomes a desire and consequently an object of romanticism. The poor, pine for it, the well-off, wish for it and the rich- desire to augment it. The works borrow scenes from everyday life and then infuse it with the romantic."
Artist Archna Singh says Romantics gave greater attention both to describing natural phenomena accurately and to capturing "sensuous nuance". "Romanticists have a fascination with animals as both forces of nature and metaphors for human behavior. Animals, in my eyes, are in everyway better than human beings, both in their behavior and mannerisms. In all my work I try and capture the emotions of animals."
As for Manish Barodia, romanticist is "oneness and energy of being one." "As a romanticist one might look at energies of people very differently and stay with it, and express the nature of energy. Here the character of people also becomes the environment. That energy is 'romanticist' to me," says Barodia.
Incidentally, Romanticism is an international artistic and philosophical movement that redefined the fundamental ways in which people in western cultures thought about themselves and about their world. It originated in Europe towards the end of the 18th century and gained currency between 1800 and 1850.