VANGAD 2016.022

Rajesh Vangad draws on painting techniques of the indigenous visual tradition of the Warli communities. Warli people reside in the rural Thane district in Maharashtra, western India. Historically, their painting was a communal practice embedded in social and ritual life: married women decorated the mud and cow-dung walls of village huts with white rice-paste motifs during weddings, harvests and festivals, evoking scenes of farming, dance, ritual celebration and the community’s symbiosis with nature. The pictorial vocabulary is distilled into simple geometric elements – circles, triangles and squares – that symbolise sun, moon, trees, sacred enclosures and the rhythms of everyday life. The resulting detailed compositions are both narrative and cosmological, celebrating cycles of labour, festivity and local belief systems. In the early 1970s, Warli artists began to translate ephemeral wall murals onto paper, cloth and canvas. Vangad’s paintings reflect a contemporary religious and cultural syncretism, here pairing the Hindu deities Shiva and Parvarti with Warli motifs, animating and adapting customary forms to reflect both village life and the complexities of the present.