Experience and experiment
Sweta Chandra, a young artist from Hyderabad is obsessed with a motif; chair. She grand obsession takes several turns in her pictorial surface and verges on the field of abstraction. Art historian, Parvez Kabir analyses her works presented in the first solo exhibition of the artist at the Gallery Point of View, Mumbai.
Sweta Chandra |
The gallery Point of View at Colaba, Mumbai, showcased the first solo exhibition of Hyderabad based artist Sweta Chandra on 2nd July 2007. Sweta has recently completed her masters’ degree in painting from Santiniketan, an institution where formal problems of mediums and expressions are highly encouraged to be dealt and addressed. The modality, with which she works, therefore, was a continuous topic to be reflected upon by the viewers, mostly artists and art lovers who found the works curious and interesting. This essay tries to review the overall exhibition, not so much as to give a qualitative judgment but as a pointer to the visual language she employs in her works. The review is mostly based on conversations with the artist, although some of the readings may not correspond with the artist’s intention.
At first glance; from a distance Sweta Chandra's works may look quite simple, flat and colorless. This is true because Sweta is one of those artists whose works demand close readings. Step back, see it again...the grayish patch there will actually transform into a shadow of a chair, the flat canvas will change into a multi-layered surface, the white space there will give way to meticulous textures and patterns of varying thickness and shapes.
It can be hastily concluded from a quick glimpse of her works that they are about abstraction and surface making. However, a close examination shows that rather the very opposite is true. Although abstraction is a common linguistic choice for many of today's young artists, curiously the majority prefer to engage with its rhetoric than its logics. Thankfully it is not the case with Sweta. Her canvases are deep meditations over what has been many painters' lifelong obsession: the motif. The motif traditionally stands for a singular mind's quest; mostly in form of a 'formal problem' that [s]he sets out to address if not resolve. It is a delight to follow Sweta's works step by step and share her meditations over her own motif: the chair.
It began a couple of years ago when the artist crafted a number of chairs from found objects, mostly domestic and of personal use. The self-fashioned objects, their images, their appearance gradually seeped into her canvas as well. It is here a number of representational doubts were felt; negotiations made and like every translation, the result turned out to be open, inconclusive but full of promises and possibilities. The doubt Sweta felt was of how to translate one's experience of an object, its spatial negotiations in a particular setting, in a two dimensional surface without the trickeries of illusionism. The conventional modes of representation, based on likeness and appearance proved to be inadequate to address the complexity of the problem.
The artist therefore opted for another mode of representation, a linguistic one where certain signs and suggestions were employed to address the conflictual play of dimensions and space. The object became more slippery and elusive; it was rather the traces of it that made it up for its uncertainty. The images gave away to impressions and the defined presence of the motif [the chairs] was reduced to signs and shadows. Suggestions of an architectural setting would stand for a three dimensional space where the objects constantly negotiated themselves. The color palette turned quite monochromatic and it was mostly with different shades of white the artist dealt with density, texture and other problems of space.
All the works displayed in this exhibition extend these formal articulations in various directions. Many of the present works are related to each other through interconnected elements: sometimes a motif or a texture extends from one frame to another; sometimes an architectural setting straddles two canvases or more. The meticulously textured canvas surface demands a constant adjustment from the viewer, thereby extending the play of space and dimensions. As far as the imagery is concerned, one is tempted to say that there is no object in Sweta's works; there are only traces of it that bring back, conjure and construct its experience. This is probably where her works have arrived so far, they have dealt with the painterly problems of representing an object in space through a layered re-arrangement of the fragmented experience of time and space. Time will tell where it takes her works from here, but for the time being, it can be said that the journey itself looks full of promises for this young artist. |
