Armed with his rolls of tape, Aakash Nihalani tackles urban furniture and redefines street art.
Aakash Nihalani is a young American artist of Hindu origin based in New York – Brooklyn to be precise – who works mostly with fluorescent colored tapes. Fascinated by urban architecture, which he describes as “a stack of big boxes and small boxes and cubes ad infinitum”, he decided to inspire it in his works.
His motivation? Bringing a touch of color and life to the New York streets crossed every day by hundreds or even thousands of people.
By chance his art was born
The idea to create with adhesive tapes was a happy coincidence. As he used it to hang one of his paintings during a student exhibition, he noticed that it drew a cube-shaped shadow on the ground that corresponded line by line to the patterns of his engravings. He then decided to highlight this shadow with tape and from there, creating with this material seemed obvious to him.
Shapes, shapes and more shapes*
We quickly see that Aakash seems to have a great attraction for geometric shapes. Isometric triangles, rectangles, it makes these shapes much more fun. His favorite? The cube. Having become his trademark, it allows him to mix perspectives and three dimensions to offer a vision of his work only from a certain angle of view, to attract the viewer and immerse them in the depth of his creation. Its three-dimensional cubes, made of cardboard or paper, surrounded by fluorescent tape, colored yellow, pink, orange, green or blue, contrast with the dull tones of the city.
Nature, his preferred place of exhibition
Aakash Nihalani has toured the world with his tapes. From the streets of Brooklyn and Manhattan to those of Rome and Bordeaux, several buildings have been marked with this piece of sticky, colorful plastic.
Each of his works is revived. In New Delhi for example, he managed to create a cyclist emerging from a fluorescent pink cube or a Buddhist seated on a cube pyramid that looks as if it has risen. The artist perfectly handles the recreation of this impression of movement. It also manages the recreation of feelings, because if sometimes the inside of some is empty, its cubes still give the impression of being heavy.
If the city is his playground, Aakash Nihalani especially loves nature. She is a great source of inspiration and energy for him. Its cubes have already been placed in the heart of forests or parks.
His desire behind his artistic approach is to take the viewer out of his routine, to let himself be captured by these surreal forms to experience a moment out of time. And if Aakash Nihalani has a message to convey through his art, it is this: “free your mind, look behind the mundaneness of life and let it become something extraordinary.” »
Aakash Nihalani also brings his creations to life on his Instagram page and his website!
