12th December, 2022 – 28th January, 2023

CIMA Gallery
Timings: Mondays 3 pm – 7 pm, Tuesdays – Saturdays 11 am – 7 pm.
Sunday and Public holidays closed.

Light is the essence of life; so is darkness. One exists for the other. They are inseparable. In Infinite Light, Paresh Maity makes the subtle interplay of illumination and darkness the core premise of his art.

Paresh started his life in the rural belts of Bengal. His childhood and teenage days were as fascinating as they were fraught. It all worked out as a blessing. Having lacked the trappings of a typical city life, he enjoyed the benefits of endless exploration. From playing with, shaping and selling clay toys in the village haat (fair) during Durga Puja to studying the secrets of a lighted lantern (his house lacked electricity); from experiencing the grandeur of Nature to learning the rudiments of art under the caring tutelage of his teachers (at Tamluk Hamilton High School), Paresh did it all. The vast university of rural life played a pivotal role in shaping his sense and sensibilities as an artist.

Coming from a typical Bengali rural setting, it was but natural for Paresh to aspire to study in Calcutta. So he did. After joining and excelling with a first at the Government College of Art and Craft, Calcutta, Paresh proceeded to the Delhi College of Art, where he again topped the class. Through sheer grit, creative flair and then consummate mastery, he made the world his canvas.

Infinite Light tells us that story and many others; it underscores his thirst for adventure and his tryst with life in general.

Brought up in a middle-class Bengali household, it was quite natural for Paresh to share a special bond with the magical city of Benaras/Varanasi. Bengal has had a romantic and esoteric tie with the ‘holy city’ for hundreds of years. We see the pinnacle of that relationship with Satyajit Ray’s classic, Aparajita.

Paresh has worked on varied subjects, covering the Himalayan belt, deserts of India, and waterways of Venice and Kerala. However, most of his seminal works featured in the Kolkata chapter of this exhibition were done in Varanasi. Many of the paintings are envisioned in the context of the ancient city that has baffled some and enchanted many, with its magic and its endless interplay of light and darkness.
So, Infinite Light is predominantly an overview of and insight into Paresh Maity’s profound ties with Varanasi, his city of love. It is about the artist’s search for the inner truth of life and Varanasi emerges as his metaphorical protagonist.

Many of his works here border on magic realism where life, time, imagination and form merge creating a mesmeric after-feel. Paresh veers us through the infinite shadows hidden within the winding lanes of Varanasi; he throws light on the ageless cracks and crevices of life itself, rendering a subtext that is mystical, magical and eternally mysterious.

The Kolkata chapter features paintings in oil and acrylic, watercolours, sculptures, ceramics and drawings covering almost three decades of Paresh Maity’s creative oeuvre. Several of the works pay deep homage to western modernist forms, evolving gradually to minimalist and abstract ideas and compositions. CIMA will also be showcasing a few of Paresh’s ceramic pieces for the first time in Kolkata.

Rakhi Sarkar
Director & Curator
CIMA Gallery
Kolkata
June, 2022

This book is a celebration of the art of Paresh Maity, and accompanies Infinite Light, a large-scale exhibition of his work across the various genres and media in which he has been active for more than three decades. The reader of this book, and the viewer who visits the exhibition, will be transported into a space of artistic accomplishment that generates instant wonderment through its scale and imagery, yet also demands sustained attention. Maity’s art embodies a deep fascination with light as a shaping power, with colour as a ground of being, and with the human being as witness and participant in epic-scale cosmic dramas.

If his main trajectory has been that of a painter, Maity has also invested his energies in the pursuit of sculpture, has produced a continuing body of drawings and has been quietly devoted to the exploration of ceramic art; as well, his practice has subsumed elements of theatre and soundscape in the making of his ambitious installations. In each of these chosen forms, Maity translates into aesthetic propositions his memories of landscape, riverscape
and architecture, the sensations he has absorbed during his journeys across India and the world, and his ceaseless excitement in the face of the world’s changing moods and seasons. The exhibition will travel to, and unfold itself in, four metropolitan centres over a period of four months: Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata, and Bangaluru, in each of which cities the artist has shown over the years, and where he has nurtured close and long-term connections with his gallerists and audiences.

In writing the text for this book, I have given myself the freedom to respond to Paresh Maity’s art in a variety of ways: not only through the discursive means of the essay, which has long been my favoured genre in approaching art and artists, but also by resort to my other life as a poet. My response has taken the form, here, variously, of a libretto in the manner of a traditional Sanskrit play, composed for several voices; of the prose poem; and of the dream script; as well as, indeed, the essay. Art, at its best, prompts such a shapeshifting and polyphonic response.

Ranjit Hoskote
Curatorial Advisor