Paresh Maity’s Luminous Terrains explores light and landscape in art

Explore Paresh Maity's "Luminous Terrains," a captivating exhibition reflecting light and landscape at CCA, New Delhi.

At a time when conversations around art are increasingly shaped by spectacle, scale, and the urgency of newness, artist Paresh Maity turns toward something older and steadier: the landscape. 

His latest exhibition, Luminous Terrains,presented by Art Alive Gallery, is currently on view at the Center for Contemporary Art (CCA) in Delhi’s Bikaner House. It gathers impressions from across geographies — from the Dal Lake in Kashmir to the French Riviera— yet feels less like a travelogue and more like an inward return. 

For Paresh, this is not a new preoccupation but a homecoming. “More than five decades ago, when I decided to pursue art, I was painting only landscapes,” he reflects. “Even as a child, I was drawn to them instinctively, because they were about Nature. And for me, Nature is life itself.”

Kashmir | Photo Credit: Special Arrangement

If this exhibition marks a renewed engagement with terrain, it also extends a longstanding conversation with light — a thread that ran through his earlier exhibition Infinite Light in 2022. But where that body of work traversed abstraction and figuration, here the expression unfolds entirely through the land.

The paintings are expansive and often meditative. They do not attempt to document but to evoke something that echoes the philosophical lineage Paresh acknowledges, recalling Aristotle’s observation that art imitates Nature. Yet imitation here is less about replication and more about resonance.