Listen to me carefully, you bunch of snobs, when I tell you about an artist who upsets our senses without making media noise, I’m talking about Paresh Maity. This man, whose name now resonates in the artistic circles from Delhi to London, navigates a world of aesthetics that far surpasses the visual intricacies we are accustomed to.
Born in 1965 in Tamluk, a small village in West Bengal, Maity has built a reputation as an alchemist of colors. His watercolors, first passion and preferred medium, achieve this rare miracle: capturing light like a butterfly, imprisoning it on paper without breaking its wings. His works do not merely represent a landscape; they metamorphose it into an almost synesthetic experience where water becomes pigment and pigment becomes light.
It must be understood that Maity is not simply a painter, he is a visual nomad. His journeys across India and the world, from Benaras to Venice, via Rajasthan and the Norwegian canals, constitute the raw material of his work. He absorbs the landscapes and restores them transformed by his singular gaze, as if filtered through a kaleidoscope dominated by incandescent reds, deep blues, and shimmering ochres.
His artistic journey is a perfect example of what philosopher Hannah Arendt called “the human condition in its plurality” [1]. Both rooted in his native land and profoundly cosmopolitan, Maity embodies this ability to be simultaneously here and elsewhere, to belong to a tradition while transcending it. His works bear the imprint of this duality: faithful to the Indian pictorial traditions in their chromatic sensibility, but resolutely contemporary in their composition and audacity.
To those who are astonished by his productivity, more than 80 solo exhibitions in forty years of career, I would remind them that creation is not a matter of quantity but of intensity. And what intensity in these large formats where the landscape becomes cosmos! The monumental work he created for Indira Gandhi International Airport in New Delhi, a 250-meter fresco, the longest in India, is not just a technical feat, it is a visual odyssey that takes us on a journey through the soul of the subcontinent.
What pleases me in his work is this ability to capture the very essence of light. “I have always believed that light is life and life is light. To see anything, you need light”, he confides [2]. This obsession with luminosity is not unlike the research of a Turner or a Monet, but Maity adds this particular vibration, this pulsation that belongs only to India.
The transition from watercolor to other mediums, oil, acrylic, sculptures, installations, is not a betrayal in him. It is rather the natural extension of a research on the materiality of light and its ability to transform our perception of the world. His recent sculptures, such as this monumental Urbanscape weighing seven tons representing a giant jackfruit, explore urban density with the same sensitivity that his watercolors explore the fluidity of water.
What deeply irritates me about certain critics is their inability to see beyond pre-established categories. We speak of Maity as a “master of watercolor”, which he undeniably is, but we too often forget to mention his virtuosity in navigating different mediums, his ability to constantly reinvent his visual language. He is not an artist fixed in his technique, but a tireless explorer of the expressive possibilities of art.
His relationship with ceramics perfectly illustrates this insatiable curiosity. Inspired by Picasso during a museum visit in Paris during his studies, he developed a personal practice of ceramics over twenty years, far from the spotlight, before finally revealing it to the public. This patience, this slow maturation of an artistic practice far from the media noise, testifies to a rare integrity in the world of contemporary art.
French film critic Pauline Kael wrote that “art is the only form of life that can be indefinitely pursued” [3]. This remark could define Maity’s approach. When he declares: “Art is my life. I have not yet begun, I am always in search. I sometimes feel that I should have 72 hours a day” [4], he expresses this perpetual quest, this hidden dissatisfaction that characterizes great creators.
If we examine his work through the prism of John Dewey’s aesthetic theory, we better understand the nature of his art as “experience”. For Dewey, the aesthetic experience is not separate from ordinary experience, it is its intensification and clarification. Maity’s landscapes are not cold representations of a place, but the expression of a lived encounter, a dialogue between the artist and his environment. It is precisely this experiential quality that gives his works their particular evocative power.
I am particularly seduced by his series on Benaras/Varanasi. In these works, he manages to capture not only the physical aspect of this mythical city with its ghats and its rituals along the Ganges, but also its spiritual dimension, this particular light that seems to emanate from the places themselves. There is something in these paintings that transcends mere representation to reach a form of emotional truth.
This ability to transform matter into emotion is also evident in his sculptures. “The Pair”, this monumental seven-ton work evoked in the exhibition “Infinite Light”, plays on the male/female duality with a sensitivity that avoids the pitfalls of easy symbolism. The work imposes its physical presence while inviting to an almost metaphysical contemplation.
Critic Ranjit Hoskote speaks of “a deep fascination for light as a power of transformation, with color as the foundation of being, and with human being as witness and participant in epic cosmic dramas” [5]. This observation touches on the very essence of Maity’s work: light is not simply an optical phenomenon, but a structuring force that gives shape and meaning to the world.
This preoccupation with light is not unlike the research of phenomenology on perception. Without falling into the conceptual traps of this philosophical school, we can nevertheless observe that Maity, like the phenomenologists, is interested in the way the world is given to us through our senses, and how our perception transforms what we see.
I must admit that I was initially dubious about his incursions into public art. Too often, monumental works sacrifice subtlety on the altar of the spectacular. Yet, even on a large scale, Maity manages to retain this intimacy, this delicacy that characterizes his watercolors. His fresco for Delhi airport is not a concession to the commercial, but an amplification of his vision, as if his intimate gaze on the world could now be shared with thousands of travelers.
What also particularly pleases me about this artist is his way of treating time. In his landscapes, time seems both suspended and in perpetual motion, as if each moment contained within itself the past and the future. This conception of time evokes Henri Bergson’s reflections on duration as a continuous flux rather than a succession of discrete instants. Maity’s landscapes are not frozen photographs, but moments that breathe, that pulse with life.
In observing the evolution of his practice over the decades, we see not breaks, but a gradual deepening of his essential preoccupations. From his early watercolors to his recent multimedia works, it is always this same quest for light, this same fascination for the way it transforms our perception of the world.
His relationship with nature is particularly interesting. Born in a region of Bengal where water is omnipresent, rivers, ponds, canals, Maity has developed a particular sensitivity to the aquatic element. This affinity is translated not only in his initial choice of watercolor as a medium, but also in his way of conceiving the pictorial space as a fluid space, in constant transformation. As he himself asserts: “I am inseparable from water, we are one.” [6]
This fusion with the natural elements recalls the Romantic conception of the artist as a mediator between nature and man. But Maity escapes the pitfalls of naive romanticism through his acute awareness of the social and cultural realities that shape our relationship with the environment. His landscapes are never mere celebrations of an idealized nature, but complex explorations of our ambivalent relationship with the world around us.
Maity’s versatility might seem disconcerting: how can the same artist excel in mediums as different as watercolor, oil, sculpture, or ceramics? The answer perhaps lies in his fundamentally sensory approach to art. Whatever the technique used, it is always this same quest for visual sensation in its purest state, this same fascination for the way light and color can transform our experience of the world.
If I had to sum up in a few words the essence of his art, it would be: transformation, fluidity, luminosity. Maity does not represent the world, he reveals it in its hidden dimension, that dimension which escapes our ordinary perception but which nevertheless constitutes its deepest truth.
The art of Paresh Maity reminds us that truly seeing the world is a creative act, a constant transformation rather than a mere passive reception. In this sense, his work constitutes not only a major contribution to contemporary Indian art, but also an invitation to rethink our relationship with the visible, with light, with this ordinary splendor that surrounds us and that we have too often ceased to see.
- Arendt, Hannah, “The Human Condition”, The University of Chicago Press, 1958
- The Established, “Artist Paresh Maity is on a quest for the right light cutting across mediums and Timelines”, interview by Anannya Sarkar, 2022
- Kael, Pauline, “I Lost It at the Movies”, Little, Brown and Company, 1965
- T2online, “‘Life is art to me. I have not started yet, I am still searching. I feel sometimes I should have 72 hours in a day’, Paresh Maity”, interview by Saionee Chakraborty, January 23, 2024
- Abirpothi, “‘Infinite Light’ Expresses Paresh Maity’s Journey of Three Decades in Art”, 2022
