Priyam Pradhan is one stylish man. The first thing you’ll notice about him is his tattoos—especially the white line on his chin that transforms into a red streak falling into his neck and beyond. But he’ll tell you that he’s much more than that. The tattoos are a reflection of his past—he appreciates them, but now it’s time for him to reinvent himself.

As Pradhan stands surrounded by artworks of his most recent exhibition ‘/’mAni/’ (the phonetic symbol for ‘Money’) at Siddhartha Art Gallery, he is sharply dressed and carries himself with panache—courteous yet assured. Visitors are tempted to go near him, hoping to have the paintings deciphered for them. “Money is everything in today’s world. Is it good or bad? I don’t have an answer,” he tells some art students visiting that day. “All I know is that it is mankind’s greatest invention.”

His words are concurrent with the small pen and paper works hung in the gallery; they all look at ways—the good, the bad and the ugly—that money influences the world. In a work titled ‘Kathmandu’, monkeys prance around a giant banana (a not-so-subtle metaphor for money) while a small figure watches over, unaffected by the ongoing chaos. The man is a manifestation of Pradhan’s own psyche, which, according to him, observes but never reacts. “I don’t want to make big statements about how the world works. As an artist, I’m just a witness,” he says.

A self-taught artist, Pradhan started off by making tattoos. Working in a delicate medium like the skin has given his hands a steadiness that allows him within a limited canvas, without sacrificing variation and style. His works are also incredibly vibrant, the colours dance around one another, which one viewer described as having a ‘psychedelic’ effect.

My first encounter with this surreal, retro and eclectic palette of his was at his first solo exhibition, ‘Kalki’ at MCube Gallery in 2022. Pradhan’s smaller works were lively, collage-like (though entirely hand-drawn) amalgamations of many ideas—love, existence, politics, religion and modernity.

Pradhan followed this theme further with his second solo exhibition at Siddhartha Art Gallery, titled ‘The Mind Of The Maker’. The art was enclosed with the silhouette of a man’s head—alluding to the thoughts that float within Pradhan’s own mind. It presented the vastness and the limitlessness of our own consciousness, where multiple realities coexist at once—our minds capable of being placid, chaotic, saintly or voyeuristic at once.

Pradhan’s works are bound together by an intense need for introspection—which, to some viewers, might even border on narcissism. At first glance, it might even seem true. A small film shown on the ground floor of the gallery features his own 3D version floating amidst a starry void—all-knowing with a smug look on his face. Giant wooden letters, spelling his name in Nepali, hang on one of the walls. However, that’s only half of the story.

His philosophy (and, in essence, art)—inspired not by books but by his outrageously tumultuous teenage years—is founded on self-reliance. It is perhaps these very experiences that have aged him, for he carries a sense of optimism that has become rare around his contemporaries. Young folks—including me—are so bogged down by what we see as an increasingly divided world. But Pradhan, at 27, seems to have found a way to cope—or perhaps escape—this predicament, and his happy-go-lucky approach dictates not just his persona but also his imaginarium.

His works also derive heavily from Vedic mythology. In ‘Baba Yaga’, Bhairav—the powerful manifestation of Shiva—portrays anger and a lit match stick hovers around his face. Other Hindu gods and goddesses repeatedly make their way into his canvases, their stories and myths mixed in with surreal scapes.

Pradhan could perhaps be called a modern theist, he holds a great belief in sacred Hindu texts—especially the ‘Bhagwad Gita’. However, his concern is with the meaning of the texts and not the rituals derived from them. He credits the divine for getting him through his toughest years, which were marred with grief and addiction, and placing him on the path of reinvention, which he found through art.

It is the reinvention that gives his works an almost childlike quality to them, they flow freely and in peculiar ways, unconcerned with rules and routine. This nonchalance is what gives his works freshness and evokes warmth and playfulness. Pradhan’s optimism—to see the world in a bizarre yet beautiful way—is, at times, contagious. “There’s no way to go but up,” he says.

/’mAni/

Where: Siddhartha Art Gallery Annexe, Babarmahal

When: Till February 06

Hours: 11:00 am to 5:00 pm (Sunday-Friday), 12:00 pm to 5:00 pm (on Saturdays)