Madhu Das comes across as an artist who is not in a hurry. His works are meticulously planned performance pieces that appear frozen in time. Landscape of Confronted Abstraction is a body of work that is built painstakingly over the last 11 years. The show comprises of five recent sculptures and 20 photographs spanning 2013 to 2024. Each of these forms and images has a story to tell that is rooted in place and time.
Once a site has captured his imagination, Madhu might revisit it over several years, in different seasons and in changing light in order to forge a connection with the space and understand its character. He then creates sculptures out of natural and found materials that serve as appendages to his body and often appear as objects that belong in the spaces he inhabits. His performances are not animated in the usual ways artists use their bodies to express themselves. They are in fact a ‘meditation in stillness’ where the Artist, the Object and the Space appear symbiotically connected. It is as if he has always been there, in this state, and will continue to be part of the landscape.
Notable across all of the pieces in which he performs, is that they are negotiated in public spaces but without a staged audience, save those who might organically inhabit those spaces - or be passing by. In the resultant images, only part of the artist’s body is seen. His face is almost always shrouded within the sculptures that he fashions in dialogue with the space.
In his first solo show in India, Madhu invites the viewer to reflect on how they navigate public spaces and their architecture in the plurality of the times we live in.
- Abhay Maskara
