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Opinion National Interest PoV 50-Word Edit

ThePrint On Camera Videos In Pictures

Society & Culture Around Town Book Excerpts Vigyapanti The Dating Story

More Judiciary Education YourTurn Work With Us Campus Voice

Mario Miranda belongs in India’s art galleries, not just Goa. He was more than a cartoonist

Sunaparanta Goa Centre for the Arts is hosting Growing Up in Mário’s World—a month-long exhibition of a hundred original works from a private collection.

Grey lines dominate the stately frame of cartoonist and painter Mario Miranda’s 1985 depiction of the New York skyline. They grow denser and grimmer the further your eye extends, conjuring an image of corporate America wholly removed from the synth-wave era’s saturated, manic depictions of the city. The composition calls to mind Richard Drew’s Falling Man, the photograph that defined 9/11 – the same vertigo-inducing oppressiveness that fades human scale into insignificance. 

But this is Mario Miranda we are talking about, so the frame’s bleakness is broken by a little red tugboat chugging along merrily over the Hudson. Unlike the terror inspired by Drew’s photograph, Miranda gives us that playful pop of colour, indifferent to what looms behind it. 

Turn to the Paris piece alongside it, “Bridge of Archeveche, 1984”, and the mood is starker. A solitary figure leans on the Seine embankment, Notre Dame dissolving into the grey middle distance. The stippling remains, but there’s no tugboat to relieve the borderline melancholia. This, too, is Mario Miranda.

Goa is celebrating the prolific Padma Vibhushan-winning artist’s birth centenary this month. Two exhibitions – one at Panaji’s Kala Academy and another at Clube Tennis de Gaspar Dias in Miramar – flagged off the commemoration. They offered viewers a chance to see, in one full sweep, the range of Miranda’s eye. 

Later this week, Sunaparanta Goa Centre for the Arts is hosting Growing Up in Mário’s World—a month-long exhibition of a hundred original works from a private collection. The exhibition begins with a staging of Mario Sossegado De Miranda: Celebrating the Artist, a new play by Isabel Santa Rita Vas, with other shows slated across Goa later this month. And in Fontainhas, a snazzy sixth Mario Gallery has opened in an old house that Miranda himself drew in 1982. 

It is difficult to think of another Indian artist so thoroughly beloved, and so woven into the daily texture of the place he came from. Mario........

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