World out of visuals

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Guilliermo Forchino’s Just married

In digital age, image has become a mere source or origin that artists use as a foundation for creating a final artwork. Hemant Puri’s show Urban Realities at Art Postive illustrates this quite well. The graphic artist, designer and has used reworked photographs in myriad ways to create vastly different effects.

High rise structures feature prominently in the body of work on display. Puri has used a conglomerate of high rise apartment complexes to demonstrate the jungle like effect, and using the same image he is able to create an implosion like feeling, as if this behemoth is bursting and disgorging its contents that pour out of it with rushing force. Explosions and implosions mark many of his images. There are other works that is less restless and forceful, for example such as a hillside teeming with buildings, standing tall like trees in a jungle; the altered image allowing the artist to play with density through light and exposure of the work.
In another set of works, he has transposed imagined conversations — mundane and everyday talk, coming out of the hives of habitations that make up the urban landscape today. Hemant Puri’s work does not focus so much on intellectualised disjunctures, fractures and ruptures as on the actual grittiness of getting down to living in semi urban and urban centres. He captures the energy, emotions and effects of urbanisation and urbanism.
In contrast, another set of limited edition sculptures by Argentinean-Italian artist Guilliermo Forchino also demonstrate Urban Realities, not as ‘realities’ but through the world of comic strip and cartoon characters. The figures are quite Edwardian in their appearance and seem to have stepped out of Wodehouse and Punch, and use humour and urbaneness as a foundation such as in depicting a family leaving on vacation in an overloaded car with flat tires or a bowlegged football player.