The language of art

Amarjot Kaur

It’s not art that got 17-year-old Guruvinayak Singh Budhwar, a student of Government Model Senior Secondary School-16, into painting his thoughts on canvas. At the gallery of Alliance Francaise, Sector 36, where he hosted his first exhibition, Guruvinayak talked about his love for languages and literature and how it inspired him to pick up oil paints and brushes.

“I am a polyglot; I can speak and understand Spanish, Japanese, Italian, Latin, Portuguese and German. These paintings are inspired by articles and literary texts I’ve read over the years,” he says. Gurvinayak’s paintings are a visual representation of his thoughts, coloured in the language he thinks in. San-ri No Karo, a painting that layers, merges and morphs three faces of a woman in portrait has been inspired by the ‘everyone has three faces’ philosophy of Japanese people. 

Though most of his paintings, especially cityscapes and figurative art, depict borrowed references from the internet and other contemporary paintings, there’s a whiff of fresh air in his figurative abstract paintings and seascapes. The ones titled Thunder to Come and Poseidon are delightfully captivating. It’s the surrealism, in most of his paintings, and an eye for detail that fetch compliments from onlookers. In one of the paintings, titled Purgatory Flowing, he paints a feeble, skeleton man in a black cloak. 

With more than 20 artworks on display, Guruvinayak paints a rosy picture of his newfound romance with painting and even though he’s not too sure if he’d like to take up fine arts as a career, he’s certain to host a second exhibition soon. Give this city teen a high-five or a pat on the back, not because he strived for perfection but for his mettle to go out there and showcase his creative talent! Priced between Rs 20,000 and Rs 1.5 lakh, the paintings are on sale.

On till August 4. 

amarjot@tribunemail.com