When the Mountains Echoed

HYDERABAD: Rare is the sight when a painting looks like a photograph or vice versa, but the artworks by Vijaya Kumar Somanchi exhibited at Alliance Francaise Hyderabad take you to a trip to the mountains. The opuses are done in shades of blue, hazel, sand, golden, and a myriad of other surreal shades. Not for once can one guess that he is a self-taught artist and has been using the art techniques for more than three decades.

He initially began with abstract, then the paradigm shift happened taking him from surreal strokes to mountainscapes. What he has captured in his canvas is a gamut of arresting images: each corner of the mountain captured precisely in its moment of beautitude--something a viewer always gets fascinated with.The way he has brought light onto his canvas somehow indicates to the techniques used by masters like Vermeer. The whole of the sky is a window for the artist here, but the slant of of sunlight highlights just one part of the blue mountains almost the way cheek of a statue is filled with light in a museum early in the morning, and the onlooker can’t help but get totally mesmerized.

The mountains take the personification through the fingers of the artist. The texture of the rocky topography sometimes appears velvety, sometimes beautifully uneven: if it’s mastery at one side, it is passion at the other. The culmination gives birth to a landscape which doesn’t have footprints of any civilization. And it’s happy in its own being, in its own existence. This is exactly what Vijaya has painted.

— Saima Afreen
saima@newindianexpress
@Sfreen