New Works: Desmond Lazaro

This body of work is a return to contemporary imagery, the occupancy of discarded minutes of everyday life - fleeting moments that rarely one retains as visual. He continues to employ traditional techniques in a craftsman like manner through the stringent preparation of all materials: cloth, paper, brushes and pigment colours. These materials are an integral part of the process of his works as the Picchvai scale continues. The iconography moves from the sacred to the secular; rusting cars, shards of modern life suspended in the miniature format. The personal narrative shuffles miniature paintings of the Moghul period - those psychological portraits of people and animals - to memories of the industrial urban landscape of his childhood.

From draped scooters to stalled jeeps to a parked ambassador Desmond draws out every aspect to the last detail. Vehicles from the seventies, the famous “local rickshaws” from small town urban India, man-powered ferris wheel find their way into his archives of imagery. He compresses the images onto the Sanganer handmade paper making them look like bonsais of the original objects. These are not photographic representations, but bejeweling of the ordinary as royal souvenirs. The canvasses are narrative and hold an entire frame of time within its periphery. The silhouetted dog stops to pant and look on at the cross-legged seated man (probably homeless) in the work “Man and Dog” or the tired seller and a plastic red chair - seen in nearly every middle class home in India is juxtaposed on the same plane, in the work “The red chair”. Desmond positions people / animals / objects in a timeless yet present space, culling them out of their chaotic environment and suspending them in painted freedom.