Important Notice

Justin Ponmany’s significantly post-modern body of work explores the very boundaries and fringes which come together to create it. The present lot, like the artist’s other large-format canvases, is highly layered, both physically and metaphorically. Using the city of Bombay as his focal point, Ponmany attempts to capture the varying pace of the metropolis, and the myriad contrasts which epitomize it, rendering the city a site of intrigue through... Justin Ponmany’s significantly post-modern body of work explores the very boundaries and fringes which come together to create it. The present lot, like the artist’s other large-format canvases, is highly layered, both physically and metaphorically. Using the city of Bombay as his focal point, Ponmany attempts to capture the varying pace of the metropolis, and the myriad contrasts which epitomize it, rendering the city a site of intrigue through both image and technique. According to Abhishek Hazra, “…one senses that what particularly interests [Ponmany] is the attempt to respond to ‘local stimuli’: the here and now of his immediate context with all its contradictions, epiphanies and fluxional churn” (“The Alchemy of Vitality”, Justin Ponmany: Dedicated to My 20’s, Nature Morte, New Delhi, and Bose Pacia, New York, exhibition catalogue, 2007, p. 52).

Using an unconventional mix of industrial materials on canvas, the artist pays tribute to the grittiness, multiplicity and hybridity of the city of Bombay. “The artist’s signature material is a holographic pigment, used in tandem with paint and graphic reproduction techniques, that lends a chimerical quality to his canvases. Essentially colourless by nature the silvery holographic surface refracts light into rainbow prisms, resulting in works that change dramatically according to lighting conditions. Favoring low levels of illumination for his works, Ponmany presents paintings whose appearances oscillate with the viewer’s vantage point, the images they harbor sliding in and out of view, at one moment hot and the next moment cool, a para-chromaticism similar to that found on the skins of certain electrolytic aquatic species”(Peter Nagy, “Kaleidoscopic Synthesis”, Ibid., p. 4).

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