Perpetual Drift
Bhuwal Prasad’s practice, spanning paintings, 3D paintings and sculptures, brings together the rebellious aesthetics of postmodern graffiti with the animated visual language of folk and tribal traditions. His mural-scale works possess a hypnotic, Op Art-like quality, inviting viewers to shift their distance and perspective. What initially appears abstract gradually reveals fragments of urban life intertwined with ideas of animism and nature.
A useful, though necessarily partial, way of describing Bhuwal’s practice is Neo-Urbanism. His work imagines a visual ecosystem in which contemporary life reconnects with nature, moving beyond the technological and regulated environments of modern urban existence. Drawing inspiration from urban back alleys, graffiti and unconventional typography, he explores the less-charted territories of consciousness through intricate lines, forms and colours.
Yet his imagery is neither automatic nor merely decorative. Emerging from an engagement with human evolution, urban and rural life, and inherited cultural traditions, his compositions suggest an interconnected world. Recurring binaries—human and animal, man and woman, flying and crawling—recall philosophies such as animism and Shintoism, which recognise the spirit within living forms. Architecture, vehicles, flora, fauna and unseen human experiences coexist within his paintings, forming fragments of a larger continuum.
His 3D paintings extend this vision into material space. Appearing constructed, fractured and transformed, they evoke the perpetual cycle of creation and destruction—the Leela of existence. Destruction becomes an aesthetic force capable of generating new possibilities, recalling W. B. Yeats’s idea of a “terrible beauty.”
Bhuwal’s sculptures, populated by birds and animals seemingly transported from an ancient or imagined past, continue this dialogue. Poetic, surreal and often anthropomorphic, these creatures evoke mythical beings, extinct species and casualties of human intervention. They also carry an ecological warning, questioning the destructive consequences of development and humanity’s growing distance from nature.
Bhuwal shares an energetic kinship with artists such as Keith Haring and A. R. Penck, whose rebellious visual languages challenged established conventions. Though his works occupy gallery spaces rather than the street, they retain a comparable sense of disruption and freedom.
The title Perpetual Drift captures this movement across time, space and consciousness. Shifting between the ancient and contemporary, the real and imagined, destruction and renewal, Bhuwal’s art inhabits no single time or space. It remains in perpetual motion, imagining a world in which histories, cultures, species and states of being remain profoundly connected.
–Johny ML
