Concrete, metals and mines

Apurva Desai's industrial landscape influence shows even in his human figures.

Apurva Desai calls himself a "spot painter" carrying his painting paraphernalia "" canvas, oils, brushes, palettes, stands and the sensibility of portraying the urban scene and the issues afflicting it.

In fact, calling Desai a painter of the industrial skyline of India would be more appropriate, for he has stationed himself in locations where one can get a perspective on things as mundane as a metal junkyard or a mineral mine.

One of Desai's first on-location paintings was on the dying textile mills of Ahmedabad, once he graduated from C M College, Ahmedabad, and subsequently M S University, Baroda in 1989.

Since then, he has painted on location the coal mines of Madhya Pradesh, the rickshaw pullers of Calcutta "" the city of processions, trade unions and red flags where Desai sees the wheel of the rickshaw puller's cycle as the identity of the city.

He painted the Dharavi slums in Mumbai and his trip to the ship-breaking yards of Alang lasted two years. As Desai sums up the years he spent trying to decipher the urban skyline embroiled with the activity he painted, the emotions of the human figure never left his canvas.

And for his own language, Desai developed a human form made of metal frames that could not escape his engrained familiarity with industrial images.

Desai is an impressionist. However, his art is not an exact representation of his locations but is infused with expressions from life in its splendour and bleakness "" "the influence of the location that always seeks to make a political statement in tune with its surroundings", he says.

He confesses that his paintings have toned down. The emotional outbursts in earlier times like "Food for Voyage", a work which showed the destruction of the ships for profit by being served on a dinner plate, to works that are now more factual, "based on human experience and the challenge of the conscience in living", he says.

His recent studio works are very busy "" "the industrial scene is always busy," he reasons "" where the human form is part of the busy background, the form emerging more clearly in the chaos as you place your gaze on it. "There's a hint of abstraction in it," he says.

Each human form in Desai's current works is emotive "" exhilaration to angst to despair, the industrial and urban skyline always a part of it as he personifies the people as some of his own, like his father, or sometimes like the three moral men of Gandhi's preaching.

"But now my busy background and foreground is fading," realises Desai as his newfound language is evolving as he insists on it being factual, but seemingly they look more emotive, but from the human perspective.

"It is important that language, society, emotions and humans all are bound together," says Desai who thinks that without titles his paintings would be lawaaris (abandoned).

The titles too have been trimmed to one liners from the paragraphs he wrote previously.

Gallerist Sunaina Anand of Art Alive Gallery sees Desai as a promising urban landscapist. "An impressionist artist, who is able to capture the urban landscape and the human movement with it in a brilliant way," she says.