With Hope & Faith – Save our Planet

As far as making a point is concerned, this one is direct - a funeral pyre on which a huge, charred ball is placed, the embers lying scattered around it. Former professor at JJ School of Arts and guru to some of the most well-known senior creative directors in advertising, Shantaram Pawar's installation aptly sums up the message: how man's greed and callousness, is leading to the earth’s slow but sure death.

Similar thoughts have been expressed by 25 other communication artists, most of them ex-JJites, to emphasise their concern for Mother Earth and the future of mankind, in the show titled Rutusamhar (destruction of the seasons). Visit Rutusamhar at JJ Art Gallery, from 10 am to 6 pm till August 8.
The idea for an art exhibition for the green cause came about six months back when Pawar showed his poem lamenting the state of the environment to one of his closest friends C Gangadharan Menon, a travel writer and ex-ad man. "He wanted to make leaflets of the poem and distribute it with newspapers or give it to students on campus. But it wouldn't have made any impact," says Gangadharan. The duo then hit upon the idea to pass the poem to professionals in the field, most of them Pawar's students and ask them to interpret it the way they desired. The result is art works in various forms: paintings, posters, sculptures, terracotta work and installations, each of which emphasises the artist's hope and anguish about the destruction of the environment.
The common factor lies in the simplicity of the artworks Ad professional Arun Amberkars installation of a skeleton of an umbrella looks like a bare tree sans the green canopy. Or Gangadharan's paintings which represent Brahma and Vishnu from the famed troika. You look out for the painting of the destroyer. What you get instead is a mirror. It couldn't get more stark than that.
(Mumbai Mirror, 4/08/10)