Call it the Malayali connection! Remember Bose Krishnamachari's Double-Enders? If there is one curator in the Capital who can execute the exercise of curating with verve and a savvy sense of substance, it is Johny M.L. And this debut that coincided with the launch of India's first e-zine on matters of art gives us an eclectic show that celebrates an Indian summer in its prime – the heat of torrid colours and contours with a few sculptures thrown in. Think of anything, categories of "Landscape", "Still Life", and "A Memory Painting" an eclectic abstract – weave into them the emotions and evocations of   "Material Gestures", "Poetry and Dream", "States of Flux" and "Idea and Object. Voila! You get a show of magnificent proportions.

At the opening of Real 2006

Major works of art with great names on the emerging scene are not isolated to draw attention or signal their importance but there is an odd surreal flavour that laces through the thematic variation as you look at the electrifying echo of Bose Krishnamachari, or the visual density of T.M Aziz, or even the surreal fantasy of T.V Santosh or the dramatic graphics of Chintan Upadhyay in the box with the face that yearns to go back in time to the Greek monologues.

On the whole, the curator Johny M.L. has tried to group works in different styles and schools together, and even when that doesn't happen, he tries to place like with unlike.   But even better still is how – the curator plays up the visual variations between works of art so that it isn't necessary to read a long label to figure out why two or more artists are placed together. The terracotta little concentric wound pots of Sabu Joseph have a terrific sense of play with the curry leaves that provide us a take on life and nature's immortality.

The larger canvasses of sentinel savoir faire present us almost with a  "Poetry and Dream" kind of connection in the works of Abhimanyu and Babu Xavier, pretty much the whole of the quasi realist, photo realist and the surrealist flavour comes through in a number of canvasses and what marvels is that even though all the works are hung in this huge Visual Arts Gallery at the Habitat, it does not look like an overcrowded mélange of chaos like it has been with some shows in the past that have had neither thematic nor inspirational avenues of thoughtful threadings about them. This show is about spaces within spaces, and thankfully no races of any kind!

Sunil Gawde's singular buttercup yellow ‘Crescent Moon’ has this ability to  recreate the atmosphere of the original fashionings of quasi-surrealist feel; Radhakrishnan's freehold bronzes dictate the importance of  juxtaposition. In more ways than one this show that comes at the end of the art season at a limp time felt to me like a didactic lesson in art history illustrated not with slides but with real works of art. Also, we find a series of comparisons between artists who aren't usually thought of as having much in common. Of course, Johnny wasn't looking at comparisons but they offer themselves unconsciously and there's the flavour of a freehold curation with no conditions.

As a show that presents the big, the bold and the bizarre, this show is indeed one that is successful, one that gives a witty lesson in conceptual art using work by names that will make auction history for themselves in the next five years. The pleasure is genuine and one hopes to witness more viewings of such credibility and calibre.