Jagannath Panda b. 1970

signed and dated 06; signed and dated 2006 on the reverse

London, Berkeley Square Gallery, June 29 - July 15, 2006

A few very minor abrasions to the edges. Overall good condition.
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'Through his art Jagannath Panda reconciles many of our most fundamental contradictions.  The dichotomies of Nature/Culture, Urban/Rural, Traditional/Contemporary and Figuration/Abstration find both expression and resolve within Panda's paintings, sculptures and works on paper.  Reconciliation restores balance and harmony among elements, yet restoration implies that such equilibrium was missing.  Remarkably the artist usually incorporates these oppositional scenarios into a single unified whole, subtly fused by the deft handling of colours and compositions.  A personal aesthetic sensibility functions as both balancing device and interrogating agent.  Panda's approach is light, he rarely over loads images into a single work while his palette is usually crisp and restrained.  An equilibrium is achieved through the rather covert justoposition of the big themes with the pertinent details.' (Peter Nagy, jagannath Panda: Nothing is Solid, Chemould Gallery exhibition catalogue, Mumbai, 2007)

Jagannath panda was rought up in a small village in rural orissa.  His family are from a line of temple priests, his name Panda even means priest.  This conbination of a religious and largely rural upbringing is relevant to the work of Panda as the themes of tradition and enviroment are central to his most recent work.  In many ways he too has become a prophetic mouthpiece for the environmental and psychological issues that contemporary India confronts in its rush to become an economic global superpoer. 'Since his return (from London) Panda has steadily constructed a language al alienation that is contained paradoxically within images of settlement.  he also made the transition from sculpture and installations to painting, exploiting the possibility of narrative that the medium affords.  In small or large format, he works through the positioning of opposities, of enforcing of structures and the evacuation of life forms, of mythic cycles and contemporary time, of value and its imminent loss... with settlement he introduces nostalgia for the small, the domestic the temporary which returns the land to its pristine state.' (Gayatri Sinha, Jagannath Panda, Berkely Square Gallery exhibition catalogue, p. 6) Narrative consturctions following the artistic logic of ancient religious palm leaf manuscripts allow Panda to use two locations and times in one painitng.  The mythical realms of the Gita Govinda, or the battlegrounds of the Ramayana have become the building sites of a contempoary urban sprawl, the Gods mute witnesses to the self-destructive processes that man completes in the name of development.

In the current work from his Desirescape series, Panda presents a vision of the quiet rural idyll inhabited by goats and cows being invaded by delelpers' cranes and diggers.  The consumer driven dream of the wealthy middle class urban family is represented by the pristine white cubes of modern flats on the skyline, but the flaws in the dream are only too evident in the polluting pools of effluent and oil that leak into the surrounding lush landscape, where signs of further development encroach even upon the polluted wastelands left by the previous urban expansion.  In orther works from the same series Tigers, the ancient symbol of royalty in India, skulk through slum dwellings at the edges of the ever expanding urban jungle and goats sip water from ink black contaminated puddles, or live in the massive water pipes required for further urban expansion.  'The troubled relationship with water, its chronic shortages, effluents in the Yamuna river, and the selling of drinking water are part of an ongoing discourse... anda works through elements of the sureal to metamorph the landscape disected by angular metallic forms underscore the terrible poverty of water shrinking off the face of this earth.  The witness to the depradations of the crane that flattens the landscape is that scavenging crow, the enduring scavenger of our times who alights on the gateway that marks the distance between the past and the present.' (Gayatri Sinha, Jagannath Panda, Berkely Square Gallery exhibition catalogue, p. 8)

The artist staes 'my work is more about connections - it's about transposing the experience of migration and transtion. For me work happens instinctively.  What interests me are the overall issues in local surrounding and their unanswered questions have always intrigued me.  I am very aware of the fragility of coexistence and the fact that sometimes, physical and emotional spaces act like quicksand.' (Jagannath Panda, Made by Indians, Galerie Enrico Navarra, 2006, p. 254)