The innate romantic in Petrarch (1304-1374) allowed himself to be bewitched by Nature’s sensuous splendour from the top of Mont Ventoux, Provence. But, spurred by a line from St Augustine, he was admonished by his other self — the socialized conscience anchored to stern, medieval Christian values — for straying from devotion to the soul by admiring “earthly things”. Yet, such earthly things, hallowed in pagan animism, East Asian art and Indian miniatures, came to hold subsequent generations of romantics in thrall, giving rise, even in the anthropocentric Judeo-Christian ethos of the West, to a much-loved genre, the landscape.

Now, at a critical phase of India’s industrial age, when land means lucre and the earth is gluttonously stripped of its natural poetry, one wonders whether the genre as we know it will endure or wither away. Will it, like Ghana Shyam Latua’s perspicacious works at Art Exposure, be reduced to mirroring the bleak, bereft, gaunt, greenless formations the artist sees all around him? Even in Santiniketan, the fragile khowai, the dusty red paths, the saal groves haven’t escaped the monstrous development that’s been Occupying Spaces without a thought for either Nature, or folk traditions.

Or even for the Tagore heritage.

The artist goes for a tactile verisimilitude in mapping bulges, folds and crevasses in the landmass; in conjuring softly sinking sandbanks; in suggesting the gravelly, ashen dust bowls of mining terrain. What particularly emphasizes the vulnerability of the starkly sculpted formations is his ploy of scarring the surface of layered Fabriano sheets, either with pen and charcoal, or by pricking with needles and other instruments to inflict random patterns of wounds. When the process gouges out flecks of paper from the sheet underneath, it seems as though these were a festering, toxic rash. Latua’s visual dirge, anxious and insistent, warns: the endgame is already upon us.