“My themes are all around me: In the flowers, leaves, and nature’s subtle arcane. I pray that I can etch them as magnificently as they are in themselves”. Madan says, “I look at nature, gasp at its amazing shades and feel an immediate urge to put it down verbatim. My works are neither preplanned nor designed carefully to suit an abstract impression”.

     Whatever the artist is led to find outside himself, by looking, is largely the reflection of something which already there inside him. His physical eyes specially under the stress of feeling, can act like the lens of magic lantern and project outward into nature, into hills and dales and clouds and flowers and etc. an image which is continually present in his inner view.

      Madan Meena has been engaged with a floral universe for sometime. And in this incarnation of the same work in inner eye is skillfully guiding and directing him to the curves and volumes which bear a special correspondence with the rhythms pre-existing inside himself. Indeed it is in this reciprocal action, in the shapes discovered and those in-born, which produce those memory images, which are of the essence of imaginative vision. It is in this which gives a strong personal flavour to an artist work and is in this too which would seem to force meena back repeatedly to certain typical  spade relations, a kind of compositional structure in all his pictures- often of lotuses.

      One may add that such pre- existing rhythms are the deep level conditioners- or so one might call them but of these an artist should really remain unconscious. An insistent probing of these formative level is likely to interrupt, weaken or even destroy the natural flow of creativeness. So far Meena retains a just distance from excessive cerebral probing in the cause of his art, and he lets nature speak very quietly and appealingly.

      The open secret which is most likely the key to satisfying art is contained in the word “identification”. The act of identification is a painter’s passport to real understanding of form, the oneness with the observed object. Without that concentrated procedure, even with all the paintings of the great masters to aid one, no true vision of natural phenomenon is possible. To paint the essentials of a flower one must come to understand what it is to be a flower, indeed one must become the flower one is painting. There is nothing original in this observation. It is already writ in the scriptures.

      Meena appears to realize this truth, is to go by the growth of his composition. There is affection in the genre, as an attunement with the innocence of the world. Even the freshly introduced human figures in his work are bringers of floral tributes, and all this is done with sufficient grace to convince us of the artist’s seriousness of purpose. If more than ambition motivates him, we are entirely with him. – Keshav Malik

     Rain song in the dunes

      All these artists were in the quest for a new reality, a spiritual and physical liberation from the burden of representation. A romance with spontaneity of the body and gesture, the obsession with geometry, sign and symbols and passion for the unknown infinite reality.

      The Indian family tree of Abstractionist genealogy is intricate, overlapping regional and the national in an organic multiplicity. The indigenous abstract art in India was an alternative trajectory with the neo-tantric artist riding high on the wave of exotic and spiritual rediscovery of India by the west. The romance with the spiritual, yoga, transcendental meditation, tantra, classical music led to exoticization of India. The patrons of art during the 70's and 80's identified with this quest and nurtured all forms of abstraction practiced in the country as the quintessentially Indian and authentically local contribution to the post modern era. Historically the only manifesto by J.Swaminathan endorsed this indigenous abstract journey with his democratic manifesto of Group 1890. 

      Abstract painters and their practice are like a parallel river flowing with the excess of figuration. The many fellow travelers support the journey of another way of looking. The collective learns from each other and evolve a distinctive style that gives them a vocabulary and an identity that defines this journey. It is a spiritual yatra from the terrestrial, an inward journey or a meditative mantra of self absorption. A private getaway from the humdrum of the urban chaos, into silence and solitude and monologues with colors, gestures and canvas. With in this paradigm it has the danger of being a self absorbed aesthetic; exercise without an edge. As these accomplished practitioners transcend and renew themselves by mutating and surviving in the divergent space, they are negotiating the metaphysical and indulge in aesthetic innovations.

      Madan Meena’s involvement in research documentation with the living tradition of Mandana Folk Painters from Rajasthan has also inspired him to join the family tree of abstract painters in India. His early figurative works featured rural folk gathering lotus, he later went into an expressive mode of playing with gestural strokes and saturated colours with fragments of nature. His recent works are not revivalist but takes-off from the rich color, pattern and rhythms of the land he lives in. There is a conscious effort to use geometry and layering of pattern and fragments of nature. The elements of nature like sun, moon, rain/water, trees are evoked like a primordial prayer. The artist has returned to the elemental signs and symbols and scatters them on his long vertical canvas and like every desert child prayer for the rain; and dreams of the absence of the abundance of nature. This series undoubtedly shows maturity and internalization of the elements he locally encounters and this trajectory shows a new promise for the future.

SURESH JAYARAM