At first glance, they look like cities caught mid-air—towers hovering above cracked earth, staircases leading nowhere, bridges that seem to levitate. But linger longer inside the worlds of painter Gigi Scaria, and you realise these aren’t just structures; they are states of being. His recent works unfold like cognitive terrains where architecture becomes philosophy.
Born in Kothanalloor, Kerala, and shaped by nearly three decades in Delhi, Scaria paints the emotional physics of urban life—the push and pull of migration, memory, ambition and survival. The disciplined quiet of Kerala and the relentless velocity of Delhi collapse into his canvases as floating homes, sedimented staircases and vertical townships that feel at once dreams and documentary.
A graduate of the College of Fine Arts, Thiruvananthapuram, Scaria approaches the city as both metaphor and memoir. His practice probes how urban spaces mutate—and how those changes are experienced differently by those who merely pass through and those who stay long enough. In his world, perspective bends, gravity softens, and architecture becomes a psychological geography: a map of aspiration, displacement and longing.
Works such as Floating Memories and Never-Ending Loop—both monumental acrylics measuring 5 ft x 4 ft—presented at Abu Dhabi Art with Rizq Art Initiative, distil this vision with haunting clarity. Towering, stepwell-like masses rise—or descend—out of arid, fractured earth. Fortress, township and ruin merge into one slow architectural exhale.
“If my cities float, they do not drift aimlessly. They hover with hope,” Scaria says. “These floating stations are memories suspended mid-air. You always build aspirations onto things you have seen or remember.” His cities refuse easy binaries. They are not utopias or dystopias, but exquisitely unresolved in-betweens. The process is intuitive rather than engineered, guided by rhythm instead of blueprint. The result is a seductive dissonance: the eye glides through narrow pathways and airborne bridges even as the mind hesitates, suspended between confidence and collapse.
Urban anxieties pulse beneath the surfaces—social stratification, competition, policy, migration. “Architecture reveals social systems,” he notes. “Urban space will never give you enough; it will always make you competitive.”
Though rooted in Indian experience, Scaria’s floating civilisations feel uncannily global, mirroring the vertical ambitions of Dubai, Abu Dhabi, and every other city building skyward. Kerala gave him conceptual anchor and cultural literacy; Delhi became the pressure chamber where those ideas crystalised.
Ultimately, Scaria’s cities are less about construction than about condition. They ask what it means to belong when everything is perpetually under construction. His worlds hover between what is remembered and what is imagined—mapping the fragile, stubborn human need to keep building meaning even when the foundations tremble.