Where matter and perception converge

CHENNAI: The Material Performances of Surface and Structure' presents early works by Manish Nai that explore how matter and perception come together to create meaning. Each piece emerges from a dialogue between surface, structure, and his personal history, between what is visible and what sustains that visibility.

In these works, material becomes both medium and expression, absorbing, resisting, and enduring. It develops its own visual language, speaking through texture, tone, and form.

“The title reflects the essence of Manish Nai’s practice, where making is a performance and matter itself becomes a language. Material does not represent; it enacts. Growing up around jute, as his father was a trader, he became familiar with its texture and quiet resilience. This connection deepened after the Zaveri Bazaar bomb blast affected his father’s hearing, heightening Nai’s sensitivity to silence and sound.

This awareness shapes his art, where minimalist tones, rhythmic threads, and quiet surfaces evoke immersion beyond the visible.

Using jute as both subject and surface, he pastes it on canvas, washes it with transparent colour, overlays butter paper, and removes threads to reveal light and tone. Divided into squares and rectangles, each work balances dense fibre with delicate absence, producing textures between presence and erasure. The material becomes autobiographical, transforming everyday experience into reflection and form,” says Sharan from Apparao Galleries.

The exhibition runs until November 22 at Apparao Galleries, No. 7, Wallace Gardens, 3rd Street, Nungambakkam.