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As an artist chooses an object of Nature, the object does not belong to Nature anymore.
- Goethe
This is the great power of the artist. He looks at a body, a flower, a bottle, and he “sees” the essence of it: he destroys it and recreates it, completely transfigured, full of new energy, totally unique. The object itself, through the artist’s soul, has become alive. We may not recognize that body anymore, or that flower, or that bottle: the shapes created by the artist may be different, not familiar anymore. We may feel lost, without any point of reference, without being able to connect those shapes to something known, something that will reassure us. We may reject it, because “we do not understand it”. But, as Paul Valery put it, “the safest way to judge a painting is to recognize, at first, nothing in it”. For an artist often the object is mostly a pretext to feed his fantasy, to awake his creativity, to manipulate the reality. The object does not have to be the final result of the artist’s creative process, but its beginning. If we will start to look at the body simply as a “colored form” to look at the painting just as a juxtaposition of lines and colors, we will be able to jump from the “real” to the “imaginary”, from a “thing” to Art.
Beauty in Art is not beauty in Nature. It consists, instead, in such a high transcendence that can be appreciated only by who is prepared to understand the “language” that each artist creates to express himself. The “language” is called “shape” or “pictorial expression”.
- Marangoni
Who does not have the strength to kill the reality does not have the strength to create it.
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De Sanctis
Mohan Samant’s art is colors, shapes, lines, and textures combined together to create a sophisticated composition where reality and fantasy play that mysterious game called Life, called Dream. Mohan Samant’s art is not incomprehensible; we have just to look at it, individualize its language, learn its alphabet. His figures are empty and detached from their background, yet connected to it through their complex colors and thin wires. Those figures stand out as pure and light souls of beings whose bodies are still part of the world. Sometimes the souls depart from their bodies, look like wandering ghosts, floating in air, dancing in space, strolling around as ‘nude pilgrims’ (as he himself calls them), totally free to come from nowhere and to go nowhere. We do not need to see their flesh or their resemblance to real humans in order to perceive their human essence and to understand that they are people, that they are us.
The complexity of Mohan’s art, either we look at its composition or at the technique itself, finds an ulterior confirmation in its cutouts. In this collection, the painting is not just three-dimensional, nor a bas-relief, but it becomes a stage. People are characters of a play and they are moving, acting, living in a colorful, fantastic environment where planes are behind the, in front of them.
Mohan Samant has obtained impressive three-dimensional effects also in his series of watercolors. Here, the three-dimensionality is not so explicit as in his cutouts; we cannot touch it; but we do feel it, we perceive it, as a result of the subtle process of overlapping transparencies. Layers of colors, nuances, and shapes give us the impression that, while we are looking at the first figure, we see a second image behind it and perceive a third presence beyond them. The vibration of those figures, their interactions among themselves and with us are intense, almost disquieting, and they come from a mastered capability to use such a difficult pictorial technique. Watercolor does not allow you pentimenti; it does not give you a second chance. Watercolor has to be fresh, immediate, and spontaneous. By applying multiple layers, Mohan Samant challenges the watercolors amplifying the difficulties of this technique. He has created a sophisticated collection of watercolors. |