The Art of Mario Miranda

- Ranjit Hoskote

Thus, we forget the role played by Modernist French journals in the evolution of artists like K G Subramanyan, born and raised in the French colony of Mahé. Similarly, we forget the Pombaline reforms in Portuguese Goa, and the inauguration of Enlightenment thought there, long before it arrived in British India. Also, we forget that Goans had been citizens of the short-lived Portuguese Republic decades before British India achieved independence and became a republic. Most Indians have no knowledge, also, of the richly textured culture of Goa, woven from waves of immigration, travel and exchange; where Hindu and Catholic, Arab and Portuguese, Kashmiri and East African elements have all been churned together into a confluence.
Like all Goans who have lived elsewhere in India, Mario has had to bear the weight of the ludicrous stereotypes and gross misunderstandings that prevail in relation to Goa, while remaining aware, all the while, of his confluential heritage. It gives him an amplitude of cultural references, a historically informed sensibility, and a warm curiosity about other societies. His range of expressiveness takes one’s breath away; his style is never static, never predictable, and he has shuttled with adroitness and finesse across a diversity of pictorial approaches.

On the one hand, he practises a spare, woodcut-like style of portraiture and tableaux that draws on mediaeval European almanacs and the tradition of the Gothic. Take, for instance, his illustrations (this word does his art little justice; I would prefer to think of them as pictorial equivalents) for Dom Moraes’ history of the Dempo business dynasty, A Family in Goa (Pgs 135-138). Revisiting the past, he invokes stately galleons and richly dressed Arab traders, terrifyingly spectral Jesuits in their black cowled habits and skeletal monks trying dissenting Catholics in the Court of the Inquisition, the flight of the Saraswat Brahmins under threat of fire and sword: all these scenes are rendered with a passionate energy and an unerring gift for conveying an atmosphere from the past into vivid life.

On the other hand, Mario is a master of the meticulously detailed and gorgeously proposed urbanscape. In his Impressions of Paris, he varies from the near-monochrome views of Old Paris, suggestive of 19th-century engravings or photographs, to the hectic polychrome of a festivity at the Centre Georges Pompidou. And then again, in the tradition of the charcoal drawings of Seurat or Signac, he produces a poetic, deeply magical vista in ‘The Bridge of Archeveche’.