In 2013, during an excursion to Khokana, a settlement at the outskirts of the Valley, artist Keshab Raj Khanal noticed an alarming reality. Khokana, known for its ancient heritage and traditional streets, was, realised Khanal, being defaced by the concrete buildings mushrooming all over. This prompted Khanal to meditate upon the effects of urbanisation on our local traditional heritage and ultimately create artworks that speak about this important issue.

Mushroom serves as a metaphor for a majority of Khanal’s paintings, currently on view at the Nepal Art Council. In Khanal’s artworks, there are a variety of mushrooms—white mushrooms, black mushrooms, pink mushrooms, even brown—but the majority of them are the red ones. There are mushrooms sprouting in the foreground, while there are our ancient heritages—temples, monasteries, and gumbas—in the back. Quizzical, I asked him, “Is there any reason behind the artworks boasting mushrooms of red in such abundance?”

“Generally there are two kinds of mushrooms—toxic and non-toxic, or edible or non-edible—red are mostly toxic. Here I have used mushrooms as a metaphor for Urbanization [the title of his paintings]. The reason that I chose red in such abundance can be ascribed to the toxic effect of urbanisation to our heritages,” says Khanal; “they do have their own aesthetic value but the main reason behind choosing the colour red is to express my concern on urbanisation—unplanned urbanisation.”

Apart from Khanal’s, the exhibition, titled Solidarity, presented by the Jara Foundation,  constitutes artworks of four other artists—Nagendra Prasad Paudyal, Narendra Bahadur Shrestha, Anita Khanal Bhattarai, and Devendra Thumkeli.

Thumkeli’s artworks are a little tactical, a little whimsical. In one of his paintings, titled Mask I, a cartoon-like face in black is putting on a red mask. And across the middle of the piece, sandwiched between the black face and red mask, runs a smoke-like white wave from right to the left, thicker at left and thinner at the right. Thumkeli’s artworks seem to be trying to address the dual nature of human beings in general—and the hypocrisy that is abound in society or in politics. Are we trying to mask ourselves with masks while inside we are different people, questions Thumkeli’s arts.

In most of his works on display, Thumkeli has put a sun-like stark white circle. “Obviously, in every human being, there is good and there is bad; the friction between the two is what prevents us from stasis—that is what keeps one going. And however dire the condition may be, there always is hope,” says Thumkeli.

In Thumkeli’s artworks the sun symbolises hope.

Anita Khanal Bhattarai’s work, with metaphors from the Hindu religion, evokes the quest of a female to attain freedom. There are well-known goddesses, some of them known as the goddesses of power. In one particular painting-titled Butterfly—which I found unusually striking, there is a woman, butterfly-like, in nude, as if all set to fly. The inked image in stark brown urges one to take the dive of freedom.

When I asked Nagendra Pd Paudyal if his artworks are mostly religion-centric, he said, “I don’t like to call it religious; they rather evoke the eastern philosophy. When we hark back to the primordial world, the artists of the then time painted the image of Gods and Goddesses with respect to their description in holy books. God is a philosophy…So, what I have done in my oeuvre is to paint the eastern philosophy as my own interpretation, with the use of symbols and metaphors.”

Meanwhile, Narendra Bahadur Shrestha’s artworks have a large area of expertise. They evoke issues ranging from the everyday working of the cosmos to such issues of social concern as global warming. His works are particularly striking for their use of fabrics, carefully interwoven into the main body of artwork. In one, there is a circle in the middle, yellowish in colour and which is fenced by matchsticks and has the brown in edges which fade as the vision centres. Shrestha’s work concerns with the atmosphere we live in.

All these artists featured in the exhibition do one common thing—they present their own sense of reality and the most striking reality from their own standpoint and give it an aesthetic value. Everyone, at any given time, lives with one’s own perception of reality and with the labyrinths of imagination sprouting out of one’s mind—some good, some bad. Artists live with it. And it’s the friction between the two, as artist Thumkeli puts it, that keeps one going.

The exhibition is currently on at the Nepal Art Council in Babarmahal and will run through April 6.