Oliver Cromwell, who led a brief overthrow of the British monarchy in the mid-17th century, is said to have instructed the artist Samuel Cooper to paint his portrait, “warts and all”, breaking from the tradition of concealing blemishes in depictions of wealthy patrons. Parag Sonarghare is an inheritor of the warts-and-all philosophy, rendering saggy faces, bloodshot eyes, discoloured nails, scaly legs and crusty feet with all the patience and skill demanded by the hyperrealist style he has adopted.
Unlike most hyperrealist painting, which tends to be instantly attractive and rather one-dimensional, Parag’s work challenges viewers by pairing mesmeric formal virtuosity with content that is often unalluring, creating a dual response that never completely disappears even after repeated viewing.
Each of his canvases begins with the search for a subject. This can crystallise quickly, as with an elderly woman he snapshotted in a Goa market, but usually involves long observation of labourers, vagrants and regular passersby in Baroda, where he presently lives, seeking a certain something in their features and bearing. Persuading a potential model to pose naked is difficult, but he has succeeded often enough to have revitalised the genre of the male nude, grievously under-explored in the history of Indian modern and contemporary art.
A single photograph is commonly the basis of a portrait, although he does on occasion borrow elements from more than one image. The transfer from small-format photograph to larger-than-life likeness is primarily a matter of intensification, not only by means of scale but through an accretion of tiny details and a careful development of tonal values. It is the intensity radiated by the finished picture that holds us in thrall, inducing us to keep gazing at it even as a part of us might want to look away.
The hard lives of Parag’s working-class models are told on bodies that represent a kind of heroism of endurance and survival. Blending clinical precision with empathy, he endows them with a dignity they might be denied in their daily existence. His paintings are the anthesis not just of traditional portraits but of the dominant vanity platform of today, Instagram, on which we select, filter and prettify experience, transfiguring it into a vision of the sweet life.
Having begun a decade-long journey in his present manner with full figures, Parag gradually shifted focus to faces and other parts of the body such as torsos, hands and feet, augmenting the already astonishing detail in his compositions. In his most recent work, he has zoomed in further, to an extreme level of magnification where bodies lose their uniqueness and portraiture starts to resemble landscape painting shading into abstraction.
Girish Shahane
