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The works Manish Nai, defy categorization, comprising of jute (coarse or fine), butter paper, handmade paper, his collages conceive intricate forms. He treats every new work as a passionate performance done with renewed zest, evoking a specific mood. Nai creates by amalgamating jute on his works. He lays it flat, there are open spaces in the jute, and at times he also colors the surface though most of the time the cloth is left bare. His color... The works Manish Nai, defy categorization, comprising of jute (coarse or fine), butter paper, handmade paper, his collages conceive intricate forms. He treats every new work as a passionate performance done with renewed zest, evoking a specific mood. Nai creates by amalgamating jute on his works. He lays it flat, there are open spaces in the jute, and at times he also colors the surface though most of the time the cloth is left bare. His color palate is restricted and in earth tones.

The space and controlled organizations of poetic colors lend subtlety to his part collage-part paintings. His recent works include several large-format diptychs. These have been executed employing an array of materials like jute and butter paper. The artist's idiomatic concerns are directly related to his medium and material. This graduate from L.S. Raheja School of Art, Mumbai is also a winner of The Pollok Krasner Foundation Award for Art from New York.

Manish Nai has worked with jute not for pure artistic reasons; it has got more to do with an event in his personal life. His father suffered losses in his jute business. The factory was loaded with inventory of unused colored jute. A person with an artistic bent, Nai saw an opportunity even in adversity. He imagined a curious mix of forms and colors in the stocked jute to which he started giving his artistic touch using his imagination. He plucked a few threads, pasted them on the canvas, and painted the rest of the canvas with the same color as the jute.

His creations since 2006 comprise large-format diptychs; collage works on jute and canvas. These, as in the past, are mainly in jute, his favorite medium. As mentioned above, he works in an innovative method to create a work of art. He pastes thick jute on canvas base and sticks a sheet of butter paper over it. The artist then applies washes of transparent color on this surface, and fine-grained jute over it. From a distance, they just seem a combination of light and dark color shades that halve the canvas in two. A closer look, albeit, reveals the intricacy of his patterns. Inviting his viewers into games of cognition and recognition as he does, the artist renews his belief in the dexterity and compelling power of that imagination.

The artist is not concerned with a single image or even body of images emerging together but with the processes. As an accompanying essay by art critic Ranjit Hoskote mentions: “His art is sustained by a subtle ploy of opposite, contending forces. The viewer is enticed, in looking at these works, into an awareness of intense palpability; the artist proceeds to intrigue us with several simultaneous dialogues between surface and depth, flat plainness and woven texture, darkness and light. “The artist also achieves an allusive, illusive dimensionality in these mixed-media works. He summons depths, distances and solidities into being through the modulation of tonality; dark, medium and light become measures of space rather than degrees of visibility in his handling.”

He elaborates his forms through varying infections of tone, shape and thickness. Once the artist has arrived at a form he wishes to develop further, he projects it onto the surface that he has chosen to work on.

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