If you look closely, there are trees growing in clusters all over this magical land. They are delicate and tiny, shaped like toadstools, and change colours like a chameleon to merge with the hills and vales. Now step back a little. The trees appear to dissolve, turning into human forms with stick-like bodies and a black dot for the head. Some of the trees, their branches criss-crossing, look like people standing still with open arms.

These are some of the tricks that Sohini Dhar uses in her latest series of paintings showing at Gallery Kanishka’s till December 4. In Nature: Vision Vivified, Dhar stays with her preferred mode, miniature painting, but complicates her style subtly. For one, her landscapes, though internally organized, are not confined to fixed visual frames. Rather, they seem to be emerging, and chromatically evolving, out of smudges. Indistinct, shapeless backgrounds come into focus, forms rise out of formless colours.

It is this unfinished quality that lends a sense of imaginative excitement to the series, Dreams-Notes I to XII. Hills, valleys, flowing streams, gathering clouds, occasional bursts of rain — at one level, these are vignettes of pure natural beauty, aesthetically pleasing with their vibrant colours and the interplay of light and darkness. At another level, they are vivid fantasies, overlapping and interweaving earth, water and ether. The vertical paintings in this series are the most enchanting (picture).

The other group of works combines two different perspectives, juxtaposing enlarged details on distant landscapes. Thus, in Wonder’s Dream- notes that bring the Real close (the titles are from Sri Aurobindo’s Savitri), the stream that begins among the clouds tumbles down the mountains, valleys, comes further down, and almost spills out of the canvas. In the foreground of this liquid trail are withering, large, leafy shrubs.

More of the same technique is applied in Magic earth’s obscure geography and Theorized diagram of mind and life. In the former, two minarets are framed within leaves, while the latter, with a crimson hue spreading against a golden sky, is reminiscent of Benodebehari Mukherjee’s unforgettable vision of the khoai — Laughter. In Discovering new notes of the eternal theme-I, there is a fountain in the middle of a garden with dotted lines tracing a path around it. This line looks like a cartographic detail: like a railroad traced along a map. Equally, could these dots be tiny, human footsteps? What is being mapped here? Whose journey is it that crosses these mysterious lands? Where does the viewer’s eye travel from here? By teasing us with such riddling questions, Dhar transforms an indigenous art form into a complex, modernist idiom.