Phaneendra Nath's Odyssey of Metaphors

Time of India

05-05-2025

Critic and Curator Uma Nair has been writing for the past 34 years on art and culture She has written as critic for Times of India and Economic Times. She believes that art is a progressive sojourn. She learnt by looking at the best shows in Washington D.C. and New York. As author her most important books are Reverie with Raza and Meditations on Trees by Ompal Sansanwal. LESS ... MORE
At Bikaner House in Delhi you have to walk up to the first floor of the Centre for Contemporary Art and savour a panoramic work of Phaneendra Nath Chaturvedi's butterflies in a small room to know the power and passion of this brilliant artist who trained at College of Art Lucknow. Looking at his work with his professor Jai Krishna Agarwal on Saturday became a moment of deep revelations and reflections between Guru and shishya. As the butterflies flutter over the surface of the canvas, it reminds me of the world's finest artist Yayoi Kusama's mosaic-like shards in their spread wings, each revealing exquisite patterns of orange, red, white and blue spots. For Phaneendra, the butterfly is more than a symbol of fragility and beauty; it is a symbol of service, of selfless spiritual significance, and a metaphor for man and nature.
Nestled and sprinkled on pedestals in this room are his butterfly sculptures shining in modern steel and sculpted in the realms of technological finesse. The details and precision of the creatures' wings in many ways fuse with Phaneendra's own mesmeric style. Comprising an iridescent assortment of colours and hues, the sculptures bear a similarly diaphanous and lustred quality that enchants us. We gaze at the painting and the sculptures too and think of intricately tessellated backgrounds—a flattened plane of biomorphic swarms —sprawling and propagating into infinite space like cells under a microscope.
Repetition is Phaneendra's elixir; he creates his own corollary with an 'all-over' method, the shapes evoking the enduring legacy of an infinite carnival of butterflies celebrating the ecological spectrum.
Then in the largest room on the top floor is the man with flat wings, reminding us of an aeroplane. Whatever he paints or draws or creates with pencil and pastel, each work comes alive with unique perceptual effects. In his archetypal grim grim-looking, intimate figurative imagery, each work presents the artist Phaneendra's spectacular, pulsating vision.
Phaneendra's fascination with the winged man is inextricable from his experience and appreciation of the world. ' On earth, man is only one dot among millions of others,' he says. ' We must not forget ourselves with the desires of our burning ambition. I feel that in our everyday struggles, we lose ourselves in the ever-advancing stream of eternity.'
Take the lift and look at his winged man sculpture on the ground floor. Here he calls it Totem and you see a fiberglass sculpture of a man with an owl's wings. Precision and perfection tell us that this modern man in a pair of impeccable trousers is a testimony to time. The artist's pleasure in nature and its abundant variety of forms is palpable. Each individual wing, whether in a drawing on the two walls or in a single sculpture, is painstakingly rendered in both graphite as well as fiberglass. The open wings unfurl into swathes of space, exuberant in expanse.
The series he has created as clusters over the last few years are delicately articulated. We must note that the artist's work became smoother, more orderly, figurative, and above all, more pensive. There is indeed a lightness as well as a gravitas to these subsequent paintings.
The Good Wisher
At the centre of the long corridor stands a monochromatic suited man created in mixed media on archival paper from the year 2016 titled The Good Wisher. Unpretentious and filled with a host of hidden emotions, the bouquet of flowers and caparisoned little bird on the shoulder become organic objects likely to speak to Phaneendra's own experiences as well as memories of formative fascination for both botanical as well as zoological species.
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Views expressed above are the author's own.