Artist Hugo Uridor Evers with his paintings at an exhibition in Bhubaneswar. Pictures by Sanjib Mukherjee

Bhubaneswar, Jan. 21: Artist Hugo Uridor Evers presented his colourful journey across India over two decades with his paintings at the weeklong exhibition that concluded on Monday at the Odisha Modern Art Gallery in the capital city.

Aptly titled as Discussion of Colours, his works captured the essence of a multitude of shades.

Hugo brought out the undefined connotations of bright and light colours. In his 14 works, the artist presented a striking collage of hues in an abstract form. But what they portrayed was up to the onlooker to decide, said Hugo.

“I think in the process of depicting meanings and giving messages, the fun of working with colours is lost on many occasions. India is so colourful that consciously or not, people use an array of colours in their everyday life be it saris, walls of houses and in fact anything. I just gave them their colours back on my canvas,” said the artist.

Born and raised Swedish, Hugo has been living in different countries such as Brazil, Mexico, USA, Spain, France and in Sweden of course.

“But I found India as my love. Her spirituality and fresh fantastic colours grabbed my attention. I have been living here for the past 20 years now and have also been granted Indian citizenship,” said the veteran artist.

Hugo believes in taking an empty canvas and lots of tubes with different colours to play with on “the big white expanse” as he calls it.

In most of the works, Hugo had displayed a riot of bold colours such as yellow, vermilion, green, blue and many more. Within the mishmash of colours created with free hand brush strokes, the painter had interestingly blotted thick drops of contrast colours.

Then there were a few works that brought lighter shades of a particular colour with fascinating contrast. A couple of works were the renovation of Hugo’s earlier works.

“I do not believe in planning my creation. Rather I believe in spontaneity. Sometimes I take old paintings and work on them,” said Hugo.

Visitors were glad to see the fresh style of paintings. “The works were a feast for the eyes and the contrast between the colours was great,” said Falguni Ray, an art enthusiast.