CSN Patnaik, now 73-year-old, is just such an artist. His wizened heads of biri-smoking labourers, their awkward but unashamedly passionate love-making, their confidence in adversity and profound dignity shines through his bronzes, soon to be shown at the Gallery Ganesha.

Patnaik's bronzes reflect the unmatched experience of Andhra of the forties and fifties, captured in the early poems of Harindranath Chattopadhyay. I do not know if Patnaik knew him, but his heads remind me of these lines of his Tales of Telengana where he describes the peasants as ``close to nature/they know her feel/ have heard her voice distinct/her fibres tremble on their tired skin/her rhythm yet survives/within their blood, neighbour to mud and rain!

Indeed, one can see not only the marks of nature's ravages onthe faces and bodies of Patnaik's sculptures, but also the grandeur of the beings, locked in the battle with nature as they are, does not escape the artist's eye.This is our contemporary art at its best. Unself-conscious, raising the levels of our subsistence to the level of the subject of the art of our age, and original in being direct and confident in a manner in which our posturing high-profile art can never hope to be. This is an exhibition to ponder over.

-- Suneet Chopra