Visible to the naked eye

For the last thirty years, Kapil Mani Dixit has been obsessed with the naked human figure. All he has painted are female and male nudes. 

He has drawn the human body so often that he can paint them from memory. The intention is not to draw perfect bodies like Greek statues, but evoke emotions about human force, frailty or beauty among viewers.

“I don’t need models anymore,” says Dixit, who has a solo exhibition Lines of Emotions: Nude Expressions at Takpa Gallery this month. The works break the rules to convey human emotions in a raw, unprocessed style. Fingers can look like toes, and eyes can take the place of heads. 

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Only seeing it as nude art would not do justice to Dixit’s pieces. In one painting, a warped female figure is lying on her side, her body spilling onto the ground. “The inspiration for this one was when I saw a woman reclining comfortably in a park,” explains Dixit, moving on to another painting also inspired by a park spectacle: a couple embracing, one figure behind the other making the body look double-headed, multi-armed and hugging itself. 

Dixit keeps the colours simple and does not hide the underpainting on the canvas. The bodies are jarring but fascinating to look at, they are deliberately imperfect as the artist lets his intuition guide the process. 

“I don’t paint over mistakes. They don’t matter to me. Sometimes there are six fingers instead of five,” he says. “I work every day, all the time, fast, in flow. I don’t know what’s going to come out when I sit down to paint.”  

In many of the paintings at his show, Dixit has abandoned the brush and painted with his fingers, likening this to the feeling of sculpting with clay. The spontaneity and improvisation is different from traditional Nepali art forms. 

But Dixit has faced criticism throughout his career for the nudity he portrays, with some saying it is ‘un-Nepali’. When asked, he replies with the air of someone who is tired of answering this question: “That does not make a lot of sense to me, since I am a Nepali and this is my work. Just look at the temples in Kathmandu, you see nudity everywhere.”   

And yet Nepal deserves a lot of credit: it is a lot more tolerant than many other places in the world today. Even in the US, one of Dixit’s exhibitions was deemed suitable only for people 18 and over. There is no such label at Takpa. 

“Actually, the art audience in Nepal is quite open-minded to new ideas,” he says. “But I still wish my work would start to be seen more as a form of self-expression, rather than just focusing on the nude aspect. My children have no problem saying in school that their Dad is a nude painter.” 

Indeed, Dixit thinks he was inspired by his father who used to sketch the human body. He shifted later from drawing landscapes to painting the humanscape. 

Dixit always knew he was going to be an artist, but it was while pursuing fine art at the University of Texas in Austin that he began drawing nudes. “It was pretty unheard of, for a Nepali, to study art. People were always pushing me towards more sensible fields, like tech,” recalls Dixit, who worked fast food, pizza delivery, and gas station jobs to pay his way.

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Dixit says he has gone through phases as an artist, and currently he is fascinated by eyes. Large, complex eyes are present in almost all of the pieces at the Takpa exhibition.“The human eye reveals a person’s naked emotion,” he says. “I started painting eyes during the pandemic after noticing how people’s eyes were full of fear and confusion. And with everyone having masks on, the eyes were much more prominent.” 

Given the modern taboos about nudity and the lack of understanding of post-impressionist art in Nepal, Kapil Mani Dixit’s exhibition is courageous and contemporary.  

Lines of Emotions: Nude Expressions

by Kapil Mani Dixit

Takpa Gallery  (4 January - 1 February)