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The in-between

Gallery Espace, New Delhi, recently presented the latest paintings of the young artist Rooshika Patel in a solo show. Akansha Rastogi, in the catalogue forward explains how memory works as a resource house for the artist to create her minimal works.

The lost’ has to be traced back Home.

Let Home be the picture-plane of a work of art. ‘The loss’ here implies the experiential continuous present converting at the speed of a nanosecond into past moments. Of which only impressions remain in the memory. If these marks/ impressions are to be preserved, they are exchanged for a codified language of signs, motifs. And, there lays the possibility of “representing memory” through a visual field – representing an abstract space where we think everything is stored. Memory, the resource house. Coming Home in this manner becomes a play; an exploration for it’s a displaced Home that we finally arrive at.

Examining these traces of memory involves putting representation between brackets. Importantly, in this moment of inscribing/visual recording or tracing back the lost, these signs/codes empty itself of the previously allotted meaning, or sometimes carry over and reappropriate. Especially when the case is with Abstract as a genre – non-representational – the process takes the main stage; and ‘emptying’ becomes inseparable from the artist’s intention. I propose to look at Rooshika Patel’s abstract works under this relative totality of form and intention. Faring across in the double realm of independence of elements and their reappropriation, Rooshika’s works struggle with “the contained”.

The heaviness of her forms is subdued, rather postponed and made palpable with the transparency and fragility of her medium, acrylic on silkscreen. Her paintings look like gestures of a paralyzed memory – static and stabilized in an order. The set of three basic shapes – triangle, square and circle, for instance, occupy the space with definitive inner and outer boundaries. “The contained”/ the inside seem effervescent but dense at once. Significantly, the outer boundary has an opening to freely convene with the negative space; and at the same time eliminating or underscoring the very idea of a boundary. Rooshika achieves an illusion of space on a flat surface.  She constructs an alternative space within the painting apart from the pictorial two-dimensional space, using layered structure of two or more silkscreen. Through this juxtaposition of forms on different layers multiple effects and visions are created, bestowing the work a luminous presence. The three basic shapes, though removed from the symbolic religious context are pregnant - containing a condensed-mass in between the contour lines – the outer and inner walls.

Analyzing the treatment of space becomes an important aspect in Rooshika’s works owing to her interest in engineering drawing, architectural elements and her once cherished dream to be an architect. Her assemblage of individual elements is on one level an unbreaking of a structure, criss-crossing the internal unity of “an architecture that is built and made visible in a location”. And on the other, treating the elements like line and shape as an independent entity opens up areas for more visual exploration, free play and working out justifications for their “being”. A space exists as if tightly held in-between the painted line and its shadow below. It’s this space that I wish to focus on, and wherein lays the essence of the artist’s works. The eloping shadows are caught and restricted in this alternative spatial setting of different layers; with artist controlling the degree of transparency and opaqueness in a work. The result is development of depth. It is interesting to see how these layers interact with each other, playing hide and seek, revealing and concealing form. It’s also for the uniqueness of her medium – while most often silkscreen is used for printing, Rooshika paints on it with acrylic colour. The porous and translucent quality of silkscreen gives a subtle touch to the work.

Rooshika’s experiments with space are markedly visible in her other works, particularly in the set of four white oblong rectangular frames fragmented in various shapes. The upper section is left blank to be inclusive of surroundings wherever they are installed. She further poses Lines with their shadows forming a pattern, it’s the space in-between the line and its falling/constructed shadow where meaning and non-meaning are equated. The works with cubic divisions resemble the impressions of aerial view of an expanding city, buzzing off in parts. Also, reminding of the symphony of monochromatic cubes suspended in vacuum, arranging themselves either to dissolve or collide. Impressions from the world full of images reduced to a conglomerate of cubes. Even the installation is another exploration of painting on the floor, simulating a yantra or a ritualistic diagram in composition. But avoiding the religious connotation artist diffuses it, allowing the viewer to walk inside.

Framing acquires both conceptual and functional importance in her work. Rooshika envisages and pre-plans her painting along with the frame as it’s the painting enframed that colludes to the total effect and construction of what I called here the alternative space. It’s also within this space that she confronts and acknowledges the possibility of repetition. Rooshika’s works operates in-between the rigorous division of improvisation, intuitive thinking and pre-planned clinical approach. Taking forward the doodling in her sketchbooks to calculative and consciously arranging them into the painting space, provides the final work with a mix of both until the suggested marks lose their concreteness and become sacred in the process. In my constructed framework to view Rooshika’s works, the in-between is a state of engagement, of being on the way to something. Her works efface and dilute the traces of mental images from the memory with bare minimum presence.

(Essay courtesy Espace Gallery, New Delhi)