The imminence of loss and the immanence of hope mark the latest suite of Pratul Dash, an artist from Odisha, who has made Delhi his home and studio for the last two decades. Dash has seen Delhi changing from an expanded village to a sprawling urban megalith and in the meanwhile he has also witnessed the changes of the world during his journeys elsewhere. What remain unchanged are the memories of his own village which alsohas ironically seen the curious transformations with changing times. Amidst all these changes, which obviously do not qualify to be called revolutions, Dash sees layers that lie beneath the solidity of latest structures. These layers are suppressed but not dead and dormant; they have an unquenchable urge to express themselves, which is possible only through conjuring up a world where the innocent could spread their arms and take off in a flight of fancy. In that flight one could experience a utopia that never is, never was and never would be, but still remains covetable. Hope perhaps is a sort of undoing of today and making of tomorrow devoid of today’s baggage and dirt. In that tomorrow if at all anyone carries something that could be the bouquet of love, exaggerated beyond containment. The very sight of that itself is a celebration of life and at the other end of it one could always see a boy, the surrogate self of the artist.

In the landscapes that repeatedly appear in Dash’s works one would come across the images of flowers, plants and trees, strangely familiar and unfamiliar at once. The viewers are expected to move between this assurance of familiarity and the destabilising strangeness in an attempt to decipher the visual metaphors that the artist has carefully strewn all over the surface of his paintings. The images are painstakingly rendered in order to embody the ‘perfect’ enchantment of the ‘place/s’, as if they were seen through a magnifying glass. The bouquets, flowers, animals, human beings etc are too vivid to be ignored. Where is this place and what does it mean, one would tend to ask. This magical land is the last piece of hope that the artist carries in him mind and heart; this is one place where everyone should go for redeeming oneself from the sin of everyday life. Viewing these works, according to the artist, should cleanse one spiritually as he expects the sudden confrontation with purity and innocence could do nothing but effect that ‘stainless’ feeling. These landscapes are the hidden layers that the artist unearths through his visual excavations. Dash is an artist who in his previous video works had explored and excavated the garbage dumps and wastelands in and around the city of Delhi. But in the latest body of works, Dash leaves such immediacy of places and spaces behind and explores the innards of an apparent world, which is possible only through digging into dreams.