September 2007, New York – To start off the 2007-08 Art season in New York, The Guild introduces Om Soorya, a young emerging artist from India, in his first solo show. 

A Kerela born artist, who now lives and works in Hyderabad, his works are surreal dream-like landscapes that question what is real and what is perceived.

Om Soorya’s landscapes, as he accepts in one of his notes, represent a twilight zone illuminated by lights that could be seen as the lights of transcendence. The landscapes, to be precise the cityscapes and the surreal nature-scapes that Om Soorya conjures up in his paintings are well designed and illuminated. Well pruned gardens, sanitized streets, flights of stairs that lead to some subliminal spaces appear in sprawling horizontal and vertical scenes.

The absence of human presence and the frozen state of activities weigh these canvases down in their monumentality. The ghostly appearance of ethereal lights that illuminate each window contours the materiality of the edifices. They look like ‘hung’ cities, a site of exploding activities, a crucible of profit production, a field of contesting ideologies, a program of multi tasking capabilities, but ‘hung’ for a while.

In the artist’s own words,
“I wish to bring in an experience of painting rather than create imageries. It is the combination of subjective and objective surroundings, bringing together imagery from contradictory or unexpected sources, historical, geographical and contemporary.”

“Recent works deals with the issue of urbanization. Urbanization is not avoidable. How we take care of our depleting ecological system is what matters. The geographical space in my work is influenced by the surrounding of Hyderabad (India), where I live and work. The boulders, lakes and desiccated lands, and the opposite and extreme climates open up a new sensual world in front of me. When I watch  Hyderabad at night, I see beauty of the place illuminated by thousand lights but by day’s light what I can see are the narrow roads of rural India. Villages are being neither villages nor cities. It remains as just a bizarre contradiction of urbanization.”

“The residents are forced to become part of cultural chaos, and are sucked into the entrails of the giant economic machines”
“Ultimately, my works are just like a pendulum which swing between the quest for the total existence and the anxieties over the present realities.”