The optical illusionism of Navakash’s paintings comes from the repeated use of flat patterns in a clever way. There is a randomness in his way of painting, but the design sense of the artist is so strong that they evolve in the pictorial surfaces in certain patterns that together create the optical illusions. This special feature of his works imparts a sense of kinaesthetics, a sense of beauty created by the things that move and the correlations that the movements generate in our sensory perceptions, which makes his works even in their superflat-ness possess a virtual depth. Navakash uses geometrical forms, which in a sense are popular shapes, recognized by people anywhere in the world, whose repetitions also energize the paintings with a renewed visual dynamism. A closer study of his oeuvre so far has helped me to understand that these geometrical patterns were there in his works earlier too. They were latent in the background but in the new body of paintings they have come to the forefront.

Navakash uses a lot of red, green, yellow and blue colors in his paintings. These primary colors have the capacity to generate a whole lot of shades when they are mixed with each other in different densities. In his works, Navakash does not attempt to mix the colors and create shades, instead, he uses them directly in order to achieve the kind of illusionistic effects that he wants to create. The choice of these colors has a different logic behind it, says Navakash. During his childhood, to meet the ends, his father used to make fans out of bamboo leaves and he colored them with red, green, yellow and blue pigments. Navakash used to take them to the market for selling and with the money thus earned he used to buy rice for the family. When he started using these colors in his works, he never thought of this childhood experience. But the more he looked at them the more he realized that how indelibly those experiences had etched in his memory only to sneak into his paintings even without his conscious knowledge.