Fire in the Soul, P R Daroz

DAROZ
fire in the soul
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recent ceramic works

PR DAROZ

curatorial advisor
Kristine Michael

www.gallerienvya.com

Gallerie Nvya presents India’s foremost sculptural ceramic artist, PR Daroz in a remarkable
exhibition bringing together his ecological concerns through the medium of ceramics that
embody ways of thinking about and coping with the environment.

Daroz’s choice of sculptural medium is the stuff of earth itself - clay, in all its possibilities of
imagined sensorial tactility is an integral part of our shared cultural history and identity of
humanity. Material is key to Daroz’s artistic practice. Though rooted in a strong visual art
ethos, he has used ceramics in all its avatars and surface qualities to coalesce his concerns,
themes and concepts throughout his fifty year engagement with art. The present collection
of his works echo earlier dialogues and treatment of form and thematic concerns but are
transformed into powerful messages of renewed devices to reconnect with nature in the age
of the Anthropocene.

In his treatment of land and the natural environment, we see that the central protagonist
in the unfolding of the works is the increasing vulnerability of the environment depicted
in the ruptured beauty of the elements. Framing the climate as a distinct concept in his
artwork, he creates an illusion of intellectual distance while offering a vivid projection of the
future and encourages a speculative look at our own time as a historical condition. Daroz
presents a way of working with the environment that is not exploitative, projecting a sense of
reclamation and repurposing rather than consumption.

Suspended between the past and future, Daroz’s architectural gateways provide a unique
sensory experience set out in space and time. The threshold marks an invasion as well as
an intimate experience of a space that is both personal and public. Daroz’s portal invokes
resonances of the Buddhist stupas that act as transitions between old and new; gouged
out with memories both of pain, delight and longing, they entice the viewer to reconsider a
new age with the impulse to live anew. They are a witness to the times, serving as testimony
to past lives and societies. Fossil like forms embedded in the recesses remind one again of
being carriers of cyclical time.

The excavations and investigations made on the thrown, pinched,
carved, cast and modelled clay range from objects of antiquity
that harbour seeds to a new future; to personalized fantasies, from
architectural accessories to architectonic structures. The dichotomy
lends itself to a maze where the object becomes the subject,
abstraction becomes reality, and the inside becomes the outside.
The artist is never the gatekeeper but only shows the way forward if
one chooses to accept.

BETWEEN THE AGES
Gateway installation

Glazed stoneware ceramic
102 x 96 in
2022

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OCEANIC BLOOM MURAL
Glazed stoneware ceramic | 120 x 48 x 3 in | 2022

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His Sea Bed reliefs evoke the Anthropocene, the new, present day epoch where we
have significantly altered the Earth through human activity that includes global warming.
Coral reefs are the rain forest of the oceans and the current changes of coral bleaching,
habitat loss of marine species and mineral deficiencies due to the warming of the earth’s
temperature is alluded to in Daroz’s textured works that draw you into experiencing by sight
as well as touch.

SEA BED SERIES
10 works

Porcelain relief
16 x 16 x 3.5 in

2022

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Daroz transports the viewer to a place that is otherwise distant and abstract. He conveys
the beauty of these vulnerable landscapes and seascapes, and their devastation, in order
to inspire viewers to help protect and preserve them. Nature appears as neither an idyllic
alternative to everyday human experience nor as a site to be controlled and exploited. His
fascination for marine surfaces emerge as an abstract surface, wholly textured with crevices,
showing his fascination for underwater surfaces full of life with various plants and animals
lying between saline rocky crevices in low tide pools.
These reliefs celebrate and lament a mode of existence that would serve well in magical
rituals meant to establish ties between humans and other life-forms: pointing to a
way of being beyond this age we now live in. His evocations of the myth of warrior as
nature guardians and ritual allude to a much larger range of experience upon which his
environmental concerns touches.
The murals depict the oceanic layers with a lustred sharply incised contour line that
frames the low relief with a powerful line of light and shade. Daroz further exploits these
manipulations of surface, adding textural contrasts between rough and smooth surfaces
to the interplay between high and low relief and completely modeling some forms while
leaving others in an almost painterly state of incompleteness.

detail:
CORAL LANDSCAPE

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CORAL LANDSCAPE
3 Porcelain reliefs | 47 x 40 x 4 in | 2022

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WITNESSING TIME-AMPHORA SERIES

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Time is a fundamental element of our existence. Through his series of amphoras titled
‘Witnessing Time’, Daroz points our attention to his view that time is a continuous flow
and that past, present and future cannot be considered as separate and distinct. Time
has multiple coexisting alternative histories and is embodied in the artifact of the ceramic
amphora-an ancient common object used in all cultures of the ancient world for food or
liquid storage. Hence it is nourishing of both body and soul as these objects share the
histories of hands that have held them, lips that have touched them, bodies that have
balanced them and human events they have witnessed.

WITNESSING TIME-AMPHORA SERIES
12 works

Glazed stoneware ceramic, mixed medium
27 ht x 9. 5 x 9. 5 in (each)
2022

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Daroz dwells on the deep entanglements of our species with all living organisms, as well as
plants, minerals, organic matter and the bio-geo-physical systems that govern the Earth. In
trying to highlight this aspect, the artist endeavours to mend the broken connections, or
restore the lost understandings, that have put us on a collision course with our own home
planet, other peoples and cultures.

details:
WITNESSING TIME-AMPHORA SERIES

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In his Endured Entity Series, Daroz captures the memory of images of the rocks of the
Himalayas-bruised and scarred, enduring and weathered, standing strong against all odds,
their strength attracted him to portray their contours and rhythmical reliefs. This developed
into the combining of the burgeoning geometric abstraction of the urban skyline in muted
tonal variations with Lego-like wooden plinths painted in contrasting hues.
These forms comments on the futuristic streamlining of urban landscape fortified through
faceted glistening volumes and surfaces.
Daroz’s earlier massive megaliths of the Warrior Series of large pots recalled the headdresses
of Yakshagana performers of South India combined with the Buddhist stupa imagery to add
character and identity to the robust forms of the archaic urns.
This has been a long engagement with solitary stonelike monolithic semi human figures
of myth that stand testimonies to the vagaries of time. Fact and fiction are very much
intermingled in this series and it is often impossible to be sure where the lines of reality fall.

ENDURED ENTITY
10 works

Glazed stoneware ceramic
69 x 21 x 10 in (each)
2022

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