Fire in the Soul: Recent works by PR Daroz

Written by Kristine Michael

Gallerie Nvya presents India’s foremost sculptural ceramic artist, PR Daroz in a remarkable exhibition bringing together his ecological concerns through the medium of ceramics that embody ways of thinking about and coping with the environment.

Daroz’s choice of sculptural medium is the stuff of earth itself – clay, in all its possibilities of imagined sensorial tactility is an integral part of our shared cultural history and identity of humanity. Material is key to Daroz’s artistic practice. Though rooted in a strong visual art ethos, he has used ceramics in all its avatars and surface qualities to coalesce his concerns, themes and concepts throughout his fifty-year engagement with art. The present collection of his works echo earlier dialogues and treatment of form and thematic concerns but are transformed into powerful messages of renewed devices to reconnect with nature in the age of the Anthropocene.

In his treatment of land and the natural environment, we see that the central protagonist in the unfolding of the works is the increasing vulnerability of the environment depicted in the ruptured beauty of the elements. Framing the climate as a distinct concept in his artwork, he creates an illusion of intellectual distance while offering a vivid projection of the future and encourages a speculative look at our own time as a historical condition. Daroz presents a way of working with the environment that is not exploitative, projecting a sense of reclamation and repurposing rather than consumption.

Suspended between the past and future, Daroz’s architectural gateways provide a unique sensory experience set out in space and time. The threshold marks an invasion as well as an intimate experience of a space that is both personal and public. Daroz’s portal invokes resonances of the Buddhist stupas that act as transitions between old and new; gouged out with memories both of pain, delight and longing, they entice the viewer to reconsider a new age with the impulse to live anew. They are a witness to the times, serving as testimony to past lives and societies. Fossil like forms embedded in the recesses remind one again of being carriers of cyclical time.

The excavations and investigations made on the thrown, pinched, carved, cast and modelled clay range from objects of antiquity that harbour seeds to a new future; to personalized fantasies, from architectural accessories to architectonic structures. The dichotomy lends itself to a maze where the object becomes the subject, abstraction becomes reality, and the inside becomes the outside. The artist is never the gatekeeper but only shows the way forward if one chooses to accept.