In this month of March that belongs to women the world over it is good to look at the versatile art practice of Maya Burman whose show concluded  in Mumbai at Art Musings last month.

In her work she is known to embrace diverse media and projects, which also has painting and drawing, and mural commissions, posters, and illustrations for books such as Fatik et le Jongleur de Calcutta, the French translation of Satyajit Ray’s novel, Phatik Chand.

Paris born Burman was trained as an architect at the École Nationale d’Architecture Paris –and – Villemin during the 1990s. She also spent a  year at Centre for Built Environment, Kolkata, working on a survey of the historic North Kolkata residential quarter, associated with the Bengal Renaissance.

Tensile and tenuous tondos

Her ingenuous immersion in the European and Indic civilisations is a meticulous manifestation of her explorations of  the history of art, through the fine intricate detailing  of her work. Between her flowers, fruits, humans and botanical brilliance she returns to the form of the tondo, a circular painting developed during the Renaissance periods ; the beauty of these circular  works is the felicity and fluidity of  her drawings, rendered with the Rotring, pen that was integral to her architectural education.Between her sensitivity to contours and colours she fleshes in a mural like cadence to create corollaries that are never ending.

Whether she creates a botanical tableau of fruits, flowers, plants and vegetables or one of an  invocation of  clay carts and puppet figures associated with her eastern Indian inheritance her articulations are at once an enchanting ensemble. Within these many creations we see a semblance of the medley of  folk and  classical within the space of the contemporary characters and realities of life and its many leanings

Maya Burman’s  works like Cabinet of Curiosities  are emblematic perfections in shape that are peopled by pneumatic figures, seen in moments of play, festive ceremonies  and expressive of an abundant joy within the spirit of play as well as heartening creativity.

Whether she fashions children or adults they are always  drawn from diverse genealogies.Perhaps a fine blend of her love for  Degas’ ballerinas as well as east Indian folk and classical dancers . Indeed as daughter of the maestro Sakti Burman her work is in consonance with her transcultural background:her French mother and Bengali Indian father long resident in France now living in India.

Autumnal accents

In Maya’s lively tableaux, of Autumn Games we see that time is measured out by her multiple  references to the successive stages of childhood, adolescence, youth, and maturity.Within the tapestry of time rhythms play out between buoyant figures that inspire and  encourage an identification, of intimate dramas being performed in her paintings. We recognise the presence of time and tide ,  of the fragility  of life when faced with time’s indefinite flow. And yet it is the creative energy that ripples through her images, channelled through a soft and sensitive  discipline. Her works become the iconographic symbols of a feminine mind and persona that  promises us the power to shape and to re-fashion ourselves  within the futuristic patterns of the  directives of time.

For Maya it is the reflective aura of  images and resonances that outlive our physical and temporal selves even as it  connects us to multiple levels and varied currents of reality beyond our own lives and location: to nature ,trees  and birds, to species as well as  languages and forms of life.

This exhibition is one of deep expression and animation.Within the bounce of life woven into  the abundance of nature, the choreography of children at play, and the narrative of frescoes of ancient cities and present day cities, there are multiple registers of life being a game, a dance or a feast.Within the theatre of experience are a chain of figures who are devoted to fruits and flowers and the parables of time.

As a dance, life gathers up its participants into choric groups suggestive of Renaissance pageants , their gestures enacted in an idyllic setting in which natural expanse and built form are not at odds but rather, in synergy. Maya portrays the protagonists of her paintings in postures of heightened play: leisure as a form of gracefully slowed down athleticism, expressing itself through a finesse of gesture in a pictorial space that appears to have been shaped as textile, as tapestry.

Images: Art Musings Mumbai

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