Image: ’Windows Within’ (2025). Acrylic on canvas, 10 panels, 12 x 12 in each.
Manoj Darekar works primarily in painting, but his real material is perception itself, specifically, the disorienting, fragmented way we come to know the contemporary city. Drawing on the visual vocabulary of construction sites, glass facades, and dense metropolitan structures, his compositions layer and shift across the canvas, building images that hover between architectural precision and atmospheric instability. For Darekar, the urban environment is a perceptual condition to be inhabited, one shaped by memory, movement, and the constant low hum of sensory overload that comes with living amid rapidly changing skylines.
To get a closer look at the ideas behind the series, we put a few questions to Manoj Darekar himself.
Image: Manoj at work in his home studio.
‘Unstable Surfaces’ seems to embrace fragmentation and distortion as positive conditions. Do you see instability as a loss (of coherence, of home) or as a form of liberation from fixed meaning?
For me, instability is not simply a condition of loss. It is a condition of contemporary life.
When we look at cities, we often encounter structures that appear stable, organized, and permanent. Buildings, windows, grids, and urban systems create an impression of coherence. Yet within these structures, countless social, personal, and economic realities exist simultaneously. Change, movement, memory, aspiration, displacement, and everyday life are constantly unfolding beneath seemingly stable surfaces.
The fragmentation and distortions in my work emerge from this observation. Rather than representing collapse, they acknowledge complexity. I am interested in how multiple realities can coexist within a single image and how instability can open space for meanings that remain fluid rather than fixed.
Image: ’The City Dreams in Blue’ (2025). Acrylic on canvas, 48 x 72 in.
How do you hope your work moves the viewer? Do you intend to suggest repair, coherence, or rest, or is your deeper concern to make viewers feel the fragmentation rather than escape it?
I am less interested in offering resolution and more interested in encouraging attention.
We encounter an overwhelming number of images every day, particularly in urban environments. My work attempts to interrupt that habit of quick recognition. I want viewers to spend time with the image, to look again, and to notice how perception shifts.
I do not see fragmentation as a problem that needs to be repaired. It is already part of the reality we inhabit. What interests me is how fragmented experiences, layered perceptions, and overlapping realities shape the way we understand the world.
Rather than leading viewers away from fragmentation, I hope the work creates space to reflect on it and to recognize the relationships that emerge from within it.
Image: ‘Within Windows’ (2025). Acrylic on canvas, 12 x 12 in.
The human brain constantly seeks patterns, repetition, and recognizable forms. Your work beautifully shatters all three aspects with the way you use these elements. Is the self-defeating nature of these choices intentional? What do you gain by breaking these rules?
I do not reject pattern or order. In fact, my work often begins with them.
Architectural grids, repeated forms, windows, and urban structures are visual systems through which we organize and understand our surroundings. I am interested in these systems, but I am equally interested in their limitations.
As reflections, distortions, and layered images enter these structures, their certainty begins to shift. The system remains visible, but it can no longer fully contain the complexity of what it represents.
I am not trying to break rules for the sake of disruption. What interests me is the point at which order remains, yet its authority becomes uncertain. That tension between structure and instability is central to my practice.
How do you navigate the moment when a composition risks becoming purely abstract versus when it still holds onto architectural suggestion? Do you ever try to keep the viewer in between on purpose?
Yes, very much so.
Architecture provides an entry point because it is familiar and recognizable. At the same time, I am interested in the moment when that familiarity begins to dissolve. I do not want the image to become entirely abstract, nor do I want it to remain fully descriptive.
The space between recognition and uncertainty is where the work becomes most active for me. It mirrors the experience of looking at reflections, layered surfaces, or urban environments where perception is constantly shifting.
For me, this is less a question of abstraction and more a question of perception. I am interested in how images are constructed, interpreted, and continually reinterpreted through the act of looking.
Image: Detail from ‘City, Watching’ (2025). Acrylic on canvas, 47 x 55 in.
If you could go back to the beginning of creating this series, what would you tell the artist you were then, knowing the journey these works would take you on?
I would tell myself to trust observation.
This series did not begin with a fixed concept. It began with looking. Looking at buildings, windows, reflections, surfaces, and the visual experiences that emerge within urban environments.
Over time, I realized that I was not simply painting architecture. I was studying change within structures that appear stable. I was looking at how seemingly uniform systems contain multiple realities, experiences, and ways of inhabiting the world.
If I could speak to my earlier self, I would encourage him to stay with the questions for longer and resist the urge to arrive at conclusions too quickly.
The most meaningful discoveries in this series emerged not from certainty, but from sustained observation and a willingness to remain open to what the work was revealing over time.
‘Chaukon’ by Manoj Darekar
While reflecting on these questions, I was reminded of a poem I wrote several years ago in Marathi.
Looking back, I realize that many of the concerns that appear in ‘Unstable Surfaces’ were already present. Ideas of architectural repetition, individual lives contained within similar structures, and the coexistence of multiple realities seem to run through both the poem and the paintings.
Image: Detail from ‘City in Motion’ (2025). Acrylic on canvas, 40 x 56 in.
The LMSA Take
‘Unstable Surfaces’ is Darekar at his most conceptually taut. Rather than picturing any single location, the series distills the feeling of moving through a reflective, glass-walled city where windows double as mirrors, grids interrupt themselves, and depth keeps collapsing back into flatness. The palette is reminiscent of nightfall blues against silvery windows, shards of golden-hour beams breaking through to lend a nostalgic softness. Forms appear only to dissolve and reassemble elsewhere, giving each canvas a quality of déjà vu: you recognize the place, but never quite place it. This is a series for the collector drawn to abstraction with a conceptual backbone, someone who wants work that rewards sustained looking, where the payoff isn’t a “view” but a sustained meditation on how vision itself gets scrambled by contemporary urban life.
Explore the full series on LMSA.art