A compelling young artist, Shailesh B.R. speaks powerfully in dialects of a day-to-day existence. With an aura of iconography framing his visual language, his eclectic and eccentric mixed media practice invokes connections between disparate observations, thoughts, moods, feelings – the internal world – and objects, places, animals, landscapes – the outer world. While he conjures up an immediate reality through intellectual and sensory contemplation, he conversationally scrutinizes concepts of thinking in metaphorical, mythological and cosmic terms. By grasping at such objects of interest in the material world to navigate the truth of a metaphysical experience, he expands the functionality and meaning of these objects once their inner character is interpreted. His works often ideologically serve as blueprints to explore the kinetic and sculptural nature of the imagination. Shailesh also ventures into Vedanta, exploring the nature of buddhi or intelligence through the twin attributes of apprehension and misapprehension, suggesting that only when a false truth is identified can a real truth be understood. Shooting Stars is an assorted collection of Shailesh’s recent work, in which the artist derives inspiration from his training in Sanskrit as an adolescent as well as explores natural phenomena through a painterly and collage-making process.
