In this era of the digital-prints, with art dominated by landscapes, portraits and cinematic tableaux, the small, basically traditional human studies of everyday moods and moments in Laxman Aelay's modest exhibition are an illuminating novelty.

The sweeping scale of contemporary reckoning can be thrilling, and Aelay is no stranger to the oversized portrait of the man or woman on the street-giving a glimpse of humble tranquility in the rather Dravidian styled tonalities of the locale he places them within. In narrowing the scope to a small space, preferably in Southern India and a few familiar elements, however, an exercise like this zeros in on art's first and most profound function — the basic act of looking — and reminds one of the sheer pleasure this can entail.

Each of the — works on display involves some combination of human life, produce and rustic outward scenes like that of the cow or the buffalo in ambit, as well as the simple study of a bus stand, a market place, a street side where the air is thick with heat and the balmy humidity engulfs the human viscera. Aelay's humans have a strange power about them, as if he has them all photographed at close range in a tight, seemingly airless frame, within his memory. A few of the works are a crisp darkened tenor, with the people set against a mahogany curtain of moody intensity. The rest have a rich, moody palette, often involving unnaturally tinted light. Most of the works in the show are dramatically saturated with shadow.

Although lush, the works aren't especially precious. Aelay could make a fine greeting card if he wanted to, and one senses there's a part of him that wants to: to soften the lenses of sight and sieve it a little, weed out a few of the rather stark elements and bring in a little bit of sentiment too. The sensitive draughtsman that he is, however, makes him somehow cultivate an edge.

The people are simple, often rather scrawny and sometimes half lost in their own thoughts. Jagged shadows loom on the flat fleshed out limbs, emphasizing the shallow, artificial quality of the space, and the focus is sharp throughout, leaving all the images feeling a little range between the thickness of the intent and the thin veil of pretension which is not there at all.

Obviously Aelay is one of those who seems to have a self-conscious relationship to painting, interpreting the work's interplay of objectivity and moodiness as an example of his bringing “artistic practices to painting's edge.” This dialogue, however, is hardly unique to Aelay. It has been going on for many years, with artists regularly adopting the subjective stance of photographic reality, and painters emulating the naturalism of photography. Now this is the most interesting aspect of his work.

There's no doubt that Aelay is looking to art history, drawing on the works of the 17th and 18th century Dutch painters who institutionalized still-life as a genre, on the 18th century French painter Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin, on Cézanne and Manet. It's the integrity and intelligence of Aelay's engagement with the genre, however — which means his engagement with the history of both the medium of acrylics as well as with the people and animals who dominate his frames — that really distinguish the work.

Among the most appealing characteristics of Aelay's past work has been a flirtation with the reality of the visual echo. Like some of the great modernists Aelay gravitates to that delicate line between the natural, observable world and the world of the imagination.

Strangely it is his studies of cows and bulls rendered dream-like by misty atmospherics of graphic lines of urgency that reflect basic banal.

In the best of Aelay's works, these two worlds — the real and the imaginary, the objective and subjective — begin to mesh. One has the sense of looking at something real through the lens of dulcet nuances and imagination.

The works in this exhibition are more literal than those others, insofar as what they depict is unambiguous. But there are touches of the imaginary too. The shadows, for instance, don't always match up to the images from which they have ostensibly been cast. The light is often eerie and therein comes the surreal flavour or a mere hint of it.

In this context, however, isolated from the visual clutter of the everyday world, they take on a wondrous character of rustic resonance. The magic of the work lies, then, in the conventions of the genre as much as in Aelay's reflective presentation: in the opportunity it affords simply to look, to contemplate the physical aspect of the world in its most basic forms. It is Aelay's un-ironic embrace of the genre, his skillful participation in this worthy if not necessarily decorative tradition, which is the work's real strength.

Does laying paint over paper reveal or disguise? Does it identify character, hidden within, or does it project personality outward? Is it false or true, an exaggeration or an authentic trace, an element of play or a mark of deceit? Aelay's art brings us to the dichotomies of all these notions that bring about art that is masked or unmasked in its intent and its passage of timelessness for what it wants to tell the viewer.

It is obvious that Aelay does not believe in stylish coherence. He believes only in rigid honesty, an integrity to the truth of what he sees, so he internalizes the truth of rustic reality and demolishes stylistic coherence. By demolishing stylistic coherence, Aelay's art suggests that painting is all these things and more.

Coherency of style as an artistic virtue is the hallmark of Laxman Aelay. In these works he gives us the leanings of exquisitely figurative painting, crisp geometric abstraction and explosive gestural abstraction. Indeed it is the visual echo of the lived reality that also reflects the universal quality of the attraction towards realism.