After Mexican Murals

A major creation is excavated from Laxman Aelay’s memories of visiting Mexican mural sites, where he was exposed to monumental works of the Mexican trio, Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco, and David Alfaro Siqueiros. Equating with his region’s ‘people’s movement’, it is a homage, long due, to Rivera and Frida Kahlo, whom Laxman also depicted in his previous series, ‘Poolamma’ (the Goddess of Life). This work is an artistic reconstruction of the imagery derived from Mexican symbolism in a singular composition. As part of this multi-narrative depiction, images like ‘snake eating its tail’ from Aztec and Mayan cosmological symbols (similar to Ouroboros) and from other pre-Columbian symbolism are used. Themes of wholeness and the continuous flow of time suggest symbolic meaning of infinity, and the eternal cycle of life.
The woman carrying flowers reminds of Rivera’s iconic ‘The Flower Carrier’; the dove suggests peace but also its fragility; the frog invokes fertility and rain in Mesoamerican belief; and the vessel evokes indigenous craft traditions. These motifs, bound together by geometric textures, form a mural in miniature, where myth and history, beauty and burden, coexist. In its intimate scale, the work honours muralism’s vision of art as a collective, trans-cultural story. Another register noted in the panel is a conscious appropriation of ‘Our Bread’ by Diego Rivera, depicting Pandurang Khankoje — an Indian scientist who made Mexico his home and experimented with disease-resistant corn — bringing together fragments of myth, labour, and daily life as an embodiment of agrarian abundance and social solidarity. Pandurang Khankoje, surrounded by workers, vendors, and families on a crowded communal table resonates as ‘The Last Supper’, where he is shown breaking bread as a post-revolutionary metaphor for dignity and survival.