With the drawing of each line, Shyam Aramban's art takes the form of something living and immutable. Between the simple actions of each essential daily act, the rounded shapes capture the complete circles of life. His drawings are a portrait of a life that flows as the sacred river Ganges, moving softly and filled with sacredness and its purifying wisdom. It all seems a play of characters, a play between gravity and apparent entropy. Spirituality might appear in a simple fire adored by faithful hands, or in the look of eyes replete with simple intentions. Making every piece a single mirror of himself; a surface that is projecting art, not only to be seen from a more open angle to create a new perspective for the viewer but to be seen from the image of truth and transparency that is coming from his inner-self. All the memories recollected in Shyam’s inspirations are like a serpent that extends its visionary journeys, from the simplicity of Shantiniketan at the North East of India, and the vibrant Varanasi, to the lush green tropical Kerala.

The heart of this artist flows with the essential colors on his paintings, giving life to his deepest emotions to manifest intensity, melancholy, separation, calm or absence, reds, blues, grays, greens and whites, seem to know their own origin to dance almost always with their own shades. In other occasions, they settle completely by themselves on the flat surfaces of the paper offering healing.

Blank spaces are never truly empty; they are followed by subtle elements with the power to attract plentiful curious glances, all engaged in an attempt to decipher a meaning beyond the most apparent one.

Whether is it arms, fabrics in stillness, or pastures and vibrant cities, everything can be perceived surrounded by silent music that the author is intentionally placing there. Music that we know exists because his art also emerges from the sitar strings, the rhythmic beats of the table, and the flutes that he plays when his soul asks for nourishment. These sounds somehow remain there, between lines and faces of characters that we seem to recognize. Faces collected from common workers, merchants, children who were playing in the sand or the winding streets of Kashi, the most ancient city in the world were people come in search for liberation, for moksha.

In all, his art plays with geometries, smiling faces, or demolished figures that announce their own desires and karmas. Everything immersed in stories that grant honour to the common people and places where he had to experience its own solitude, social challenges, and at the same time, freedom; sites were he had to stop for more than an instant to bring from his inner eyes a form or a shape that will come back at us with energy, knocking again and again on the doors of our own internal narrative.

Without a doubt, Shyam Aramban projects his soul through all possible materials and instruments, crossing the barriers of a single cultural aesthetic perception, showing us the strength of art as an infinite and inexhaustible language.

write-up by

Elizabeth Corona Palomera

Linguist, Poet & Art- Interpreter

Mexico

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