After years of capturing the rhythms of Telangana—its villages, labouring bodies, and folk rituals—Laxman Aelay shifts his gaze to his inner worlds. Silent Conversations, his latest exhibition at Artisera in Bengaluru, feels less like reportage and more like a private notebook: layered, restless, intimate.
Featuring over 160 works, the exhibition moves fluidly across black-and-white drawings on linen, quasi-cubistic sketches, ink-dense animal portraits, sculptural wooden toys and sudden eruptions of colour. Each series feels like a different language, yet all speak in the same unmistakable voice of the artist’s most intimate experiences.
His days in New York and Mexico surface most forcefully in the exhibition’s monochrome works, where humans, animals and mythical forms collide. Migration, labour, memory and longing overlap on the same plane. One key series, Murmured Narratives, unfolds like a crowded public square: multiple lives brushing past one another, each carrying its own fragment of history.
An unexpected catalyst for this phase came closer to home. Aelay’s young grandson, Aarav, began spending time in the studio. “He came to my studio every day,” Aelay says. “He would draw, and his playfulness inspired me.” This unlikely friendship led to Domesticated Animilia, a sculptural series of brightly coloured wooden animals. Toy-like in scale and exaggeration, the works balance whimsy with something older and wilder, echoing both childhood imagination and folk symbolism.
Animals thread their way through the exhibition as metaphors and companions—horses for freedom, birds for transcendence, roosters for vigilance, cats for intuition, fish for the flow of thought. In Inked Reflections, they appear as resilient presences, rendered with bold outer strokes and intricate inner detailing, as if their emotional lives are mapped beneath the skin.
Another quiet anchor is Sixty@60, a group of sixty small works created the same year Aelay turned sixty. Seen together, they read like visual diary entries, alert to both memory and possibility.
Viewed collectively, Silent Conversations feels like a culmination without the weight of a retrospective. Every self Aelay has inhabited finds space here—illustrator, chronicler of Telangana’s working-class and folk forms, filmmaker, draughtsman, grandfather. He insists he isn’t turning away from Telangana, only toward something he had long postponed. The exhibition feels radical precisely because it breaks from the familiar while honouring it. “In black and white, you have only two colours,” he says. “But you must show all the greys in between. That is the challenge, that is the joy.”
When & Where:
Silent Conversations, Artisera, Bengaluru; until January 10