Fish

Badri Narayan’s familiar fruit or watermelon peddlers with their carts may have lulled us into a superficial understanding of his subjects but the artist is anything but predictable. His ability to surprise us rests in his tongue-in-cheek compositions such as this. What first appears to be abstract unravels to reveal itself like a still-life with a fish placed on a plate. The ‘fish’ seems to have imbibed the floral colours and pattern of the platter, thereby building on their symbiotic relationship as most people see it—merely as food on the plate.