I paint+print stories. They are short, around the time it takes for one’s thoughts to wander and be brought back. These stories are based on the lies that I repeatedly delude myself with or rationalize away when confronted with unpleasant moments of reality. Through my works, I am exploring how I react to these lies:
- In single panel works, I show how I instinctually respond to unpleasant emotions with suppression and its byproducts – the fidgeting, the twitching, the jitteriness that escapes conscious control.
- In triptychs, I reveal my compulsion to relitigate those uncomfortable incidents from the past that have evaded suppression. In each of the three panels, I show how I unintentionally and unconsciously sift through a flood of alternative narratives, cherrypicking the one that is in agreement with my current state of mind.
To create these artworks I assemble, layer, and glue together letter-sized pieces of vellum paper, painted+printed on both sides. Without following an organized (or even a specific) layout, the pages are overlapped and connected, like how self-delusions are built incrementally, using one lie to reinforce the next.
I make these works to ask: is suppression or re-narrativization a defining strength of ours, that helps us cope and keep moving forward when reality appears too vexing? Or, is this self-delusion a fundamental weakness, obscuring reality to the point where we lose our ability to healthily respond to it?
Manas Ranjan is a New York-based visual artist working in painting and printmaking. His practice explores a particular kind of lie, one that he says to himself quietly to self-delude, to suppress discomfort, and (when both of these fail) to re-narrativize the entire incident.
He trained and practiced as an architect, where he developed a sensibility towards materials and how their properties emotionally impact us. This led him to employ vellum as his primary medium. By layering and gluing pages of vellum together, he brings variations in the transparency of the painting, making it analogous to the nature of a lie – showing an impression of what’s beneath, while obscuring it. He reveals the inherent tension of maintaining these lies, by displaying the artwork suspended within a PVC pipe frame.
He later trained in urban economics, where he statistically modeled how our choices change with tweaks in our environment (for example, which route motivates more cyclists — a longer gradual path with fewer rest points, or a shorter steeper one with more). It nudged him to observe real events while imagining their counterfactuals. This has influenced the core theme in the narratives of his paintings, specifically in his diptychs/triptychs: multiple panels, multiple versions of the same incident, the mind shown sifting and selecting the narrative that suits it best in that moment.
email: manas@manasranjan.studio
instagram: manasranjan.studio