Echo – an art installation

It showcases Bhavyo’s skills, acquired over the last five years within his art medium – a combination of ink, acrylic, and spray paint. The exhibition depicts, in various forms, a mountain range of the Himalayas where Bhavyo has trekked and found inspiration.

The elegantly understated piece at the heart of the show is a long scroll of paper humbly hugging a length of curved wall. Painted on it are several iterations of the same mountain range. This piece of parchment has voyaged in Bhavyo’s backpack all the way to the Himalayas, and once there, at the foot of the mountains, he took in his object by painting it live. Based on this scroll, he painted several of the showcased pieces over the last two years.

Standing apart from other exhibitions and artists, the bigger pieces that would inhabit the art gallery with more stature (to mimic the imposing mountains they represent), were painted on the spot, in the art gallery. Bhavyo spent the few weeks leading up to the exhibition in the Centre d’Art itself, where he took the time to tune in to the gallery rooms and natural lighting and sense how he could, accordingly, create these large pieces to best fill the space. Standing upright and equipped with a giant metre-long inkbrush, he started trialling with minimalistic strokes, finding how to best represent the snow-capped peaks with a few touches of black ink. The trials were what took up most of the preparatory time, with the final pieces being created within minutes, springing out spontaneously thanks to all the prior preparation.

Rocks brought back from the same mountain range add to the atmosphere and pave a virtual stone path, from one room to the other. Bhavyo and his friends each painstakingly brought back one of those heavy stones in their backpacks from their Himalayan trek.

The biggest piece showcased consists of massive scrolls of paper hanging down from the ceiling to the ground, generously unfolding a few metres horizontally onto the floor, perhaps suggesting an expanse of snow. Slowly walking through these strategically hanging scrolls painted with great fragmented mountain lines, one emerges at the other end to discover a sizable painting of the same mountain, depicted in its entirety. The installation thus reminds us of the journey that is to be undertaken, whether on an adventure trek, or an inner artistic journey, to behold the mountains.

Bhavyo puts it in his own words:

“The journey which led me to paint this mountain began five years ago on slopes of another range. Battered and beaten by weather in the midst of a trek, the world stood still. The mountains and a little me, unable to fathom their presence in the slightest.

Caught in a moment which called me back to their arms again and again I had to find a way to go past the noise, to Them and unearth in silence their story chiseled as far as the eye can see.

This process of repetition in an attempt to translate onto paper the mountain as it stands, a presence absolute, like a Truth one cannot fathom, is my search for That which is intangible, yet so clearly present.

I am at the beginning of a long road, a few steps into the journey.”