Perhaps this is close to something the artist Sujan Dangol is trying to get across to viewers through paintings that are part of Through My Stories, an exhibit currently taking place at the Siddhartha Art Gallery. Dangol is co-recipient, with fellow exhibitor Anil Shahi, of the 2013 Australian Himalayan Art Award, and his current series draws heavily from life. His stories are those of artist, student, boy, man, animal, even ‘alien’, at one point, and each canvas carries within it separate worlds often linked only by the fact that they come from the mind and spirit of the same artist.

Paintings by Anil Shahi, on the other hand, are more like chapters of a novel; an eerie, surreal, discomforting novel. His Smile With Me exhibit is populated by white-faced, oval-eyed, red-bodied beings that never leave his canvases. They look eerily like clowns but there is nothing funny about them. Bright red Glasgow Smiles are painted over their identical white faces, and the ‘men’—for they have certainly been painted with the bodies of men—stare back unrelentingly at their viewers.  They distort, disturb and leave one feeling like one has just visited an asylum; a feeling that becomes all the more uneasy when one can no longer ignore the fact that those strange red beings are everyday individuals; ‘normal’ people, just like us.

The fact that Shahi’s and Dangol’s paintings are placed alongside each other only serves to highlight the differences in the two artists’ take on human condition. While Shahi’s world is an unsettling space, Dangol’s is one where quirk and whimsy reign supreme. He seems genuinely able to see humour, even find jollity, in life. His triptychs—of youth, adulthood and old age, and of scholarship (before, during and after graduation)—in particular, achieve much effect without being bogged down by heavy imagery. His dig at Nepal’s ideas and definitions of ‘higher’ education or in fact any sort of institutionalised education—a self-portrait, no doubt—is as ‘enlightening’ (there are halos involved, after all) as it is hilarious.

What Dangol achieves here, by not limiting himself to one voice, is a collage of thoughts and consciousnesses. The artist is able to show numerous facets of himself through the exhibit. Exhibition-goers see wit and light-heartedness but also seriousness and concern.  His little boy has Coca Cola and Spider Man in his mind, but the working man is ridden by day-to-day concerns. He has dreams still, but time is slipping by and he will soon become the old one, with only memories to hold on to, relegated to the spheres of all things broken and mangled.

And although Shahi’s inappeasable red men come and transport onlookers into their eerie world time and again, Dangol’s images bring back much joy, some sense and sometimes even logic to the picture. “It’s all about transforming ideas, energies and playfulness into one’s artwork,” he says in his introduction to Through My Stories and his paintings have certainly achieved this. As a showcase of what young Nepali artists are capable of achieving, Siddhartha Art Gallery’s newest exhibition works just about brilliantly.

The exhibition will continue at the SAG till March 7. Gallery hours are from 11 am to 5 pm (Monday to Friday) and 12 noon to 4 pm (Saturday)