Art review by Joy Deep (J.D.)
My mind stumbled upon one of the quotes whilst looking at the artwork of Dr. Sukant Khurana ‘Connecting the Dots’ as shared then by the late great Steve Jobs during Stanford Commencement Speech in 2005. The quote, “Appearances are often deceiving” happened to be from the collection of fables credited to Aesop, a slave and storyteller believed to have lived in ancient Greece between 620 and 564 BC. The life and times saw a drastic change over the last two millenia. I wonder what it is that still remained unchanged.
Every time I look at his paintings and the themes associated with them — I wonder whether he is trying to provide answers to some of the most complex questions or he is trying to mirror the facade, which is more or less created by self these days. It also reminds me of a song which is like, “You are smiling so much, you are smiling so much. What is the sorrow that you are hiding?” You will certainly get brownie points for guessing it right. Now, here’s the hint — from fables to ghazals, from compositions to depictions — the human mind tends to surround itself with situations, people, places and things. Existence then and now is still circumstantial. Happiness then and now is still temporary. I must say that it takes a lot of courage to admit that. I’d like to congratulate Dr. Khurana that he made an honest attempt to bring such an admission to the limelight by highlighting the situational aspects of the human psyche by focusing more on the background than on the subject. There is no art form on earth which cannot be articulated in words. However, it is also true that every time you read a review, it creates an impression in your mind and the moment you start reading more of them — your mind will start the process of creating layers of information one upon the other; just like Dr. Sukant Khurana’s paintings. The best thing you can do is to be there and check this out because seeing is believing.