Often associated with nature, the idea of fragile beauty often found in Vick Naresh’s paintings draws attention to the quality of beauty, its susceptibility to interference and definition from another often becoming the fodder of insecurity that results in the destruction, or refusal to qualify what is different as beautiful. The problem here arises when ‘beauty’ falls out of Western standard ideas of what it ‘should’ embody. This destructive behavior can also be applied to physical beauty - not interested in the individual - as a society- we chop off, alter, and as Poet Marge Percy argues in her poem “ Barbie Doll,” where a young girl ends up cutting off her nose and legs because they were deemed to be too big to be considered beautiful - these actions of course, result in death and thus there are inherent dangers connected to beauty.
Fragile beauty, in Naresh’s paintings is found and interpreted in the external, the internal, as well as the environment that hosts us all. The condition of beauty relies heavily on the definition of another, and respect as well. Considering the environment, beauty has not historically been something that we aggressively preserve, on the contrary, it is the natural beauty in a landscape that compels us to change it, alter it, invade it, take ownership of it, and often in doing so we end up destroying it.
Focusing on color and line, Naresh often depicts portraits, and landscapes that somehow in their fractured depictions present the viewer with colorful palettes that we all desire entrance. Toying with qualities of surrealism and cubism, Naresh leads his viewer through many twists and turns that result in the complete image, similarity life does the same; we are all the bits and pieces of both experience and society that create the complete and complex entities that we all are. Often using a coded language, like that of dream narratives, Naresh further takes us down pathways towards a universal of what is beauty and under his skillful application of paint leads us to the conclusion that beauty leaves the plain of fragility once placed upon the canvas.
