Dotty about his work

Mohan Malviya gets a major showing for works that play hide and seek with nature, says Kishore Singh

The art of the Gond tribals consists entirely of dots, painted finely and in such close proximity that it becomes a seamless work, best exemplified in the paintings of Jangarh Singh Shyam.

But Mohan Malviya found his dots in other, unexplained places as well "" in the rock paintings of Bhimbetka, for instance, and in the tattoos of the tribals of Chhatisgarh, some of which he wears with pride.

Triumphant after the opening of his first major show at Delhi's Art Alive Gallery (though he had shown four years previously at Triveni), Malviya is ecstatic about the attendance not because of the celebrity factor but because there were so many senior artists in attendance "" he reels off the names of those whose works he has admired over the years, and who now turned up to look at his work.

Cut to a life in the deep heart of Madhya Pradesh, the Narmada as inspiration, and a brother studying commercial art who yanked him away from his rural roots to Indore, a formal education in art (which he abjured), a period of informal learning at Bhopal's Bharat Bhawan, and then his move to the capital where he now lives and paints. Shy, diffident, even reticent, Malviya's works consist of multi-layered abstractions that create levels of seeing that are open to many interpretations.

But through them all are the dots that fascinate him "" here providing a direction, there looking like elements in a celestial world, elsewhere swaying to the commands of currents in an underwater world.

Those dots were less visible initially, when Malviya's work was determined by their presence on white paper. Slowly, they gave way to aquamarine hues, a phase that stayed with him for a while and formed part of his earliest works.

It was a period of thinking out through his canvas, he says, of creation and creating. Bhopal gave him that "" the articulation of art and art theories not as interpreted by the masters of the West, but through his proximity to nature and as his homage to it.

Malviya believes that art, like nature itself, is a work in progress "" we have never seen its beginning, and there is no end. Spartan in the exttreme, he is happiest in front of his canvases, the doors closed against an intrusive world, all sounds banished, with only a brush and, for some time now, the brightest, most colourful paints at his command. For some time then, Malviya is not just an artist "" he is nature itself.