Balaji Ponna

Through his paintings Balaji Ponna reveals the persuasive mechanisms with which people convince themselves of the importance of their actions. The large-scale works, at times shot through with light irony and at others with grotesque paradoxes, are made with the perfect attention to details of Indo-Persian miniatures. The situation that Ponna knows best, that of India, is the main centre of his interests.

The artist investigates the universal mechanisms of human nature, which only takes on different nuances in order to adapt to different situations: in this case the strong contrasts within India. His art is anything but a chronicle, just as it is basically different and distant from any kind of social comment: the errors of the world are inherent in humanity itself.

And so the artist is a kind of Jiminy Cricket with the task of revealing the mechanisms for convincing and persuading, and in this sense he does not even spare the art system. Ponna, with a barely sketched smile, looks at the world in which he lives, knowing, to paraphrase Voltaire, that he lives “in the only possible world”.