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Of the austere surface

The Baroda based printmaker turned painter Santana Gohain works towards revealing the hidden layers of the immediate. Her works have an austere quality, a silence that contains sound and the darkness that contains light, observes Vrushali Dhage.

For Santana Gohain the process of painting is not restricted to the conventional tools – of brushes and colours. Good works always tease and push religiously followed conventions. Not working in a regular, rather prescribed path, Gohain lets her creative impulse direct her logic of working. A printmaker turned painter Gohain's works divulge the influence of these faculties. At times they seem to be an extension of innocent childlike scribbled drawings, and at the next moment they vein the quality of a painting.

A feel of palpable silence hits almost immediately as one looks at these works. It is the 'darkness' (in her works) – which she employs to play with 'light'. Unframed and lacking boundaries they invite the viewer to unveil what lies beneath/within. As is her wont, Gohain plays with various materials to produce textures of varying feel; from smooth lustrous metallic sheen to a rough granular stone; from solid, opaque earthiness to the transparent brightness/clarity of light.   At times they look like malleable metal sheets and at times a stone tablet from the some ancient civilization carrying an inscription in a cryptic language. Forms placed/ get placed, in a sentence like manner. Here it is a highly selective / reflective process, a process of inclusion and exclusion, where Gohain decides upon the every 'next element or form' which will shape the sentence. It is always a challenge to create the next form as it carries the influence of the previous one and it is the interaction of these two which will result the following chain. The outcome is a thoughtful amalgamation of the textural surface and the script. And even as you feel that you have deciphered the iconography there is something which will put you back in doubt. There is no effort to set up a narrative, Gohain leaves it to the viewer to accept or recognize what is visible.

What goes in bridging the gap between the conceptual and the formal, and in materializing Gohain's thoughts is a process of metamorphosis - where Gohain skillfully juxtaposes various materials and mediums, softness of charcoal to slate like hardness of grey with a sculptural quality, the fibrous feel of textile. She uses this incongruity of materials to track various possibilities of abstraction. From somber black to grey, to colourful hues she justifiably defines their presence.   Her love for drawing, engraving/making-marks on surfaces, which is visible in her works further intrigues the viewers. Her love for etching has accompanied her from her childhood; making drawing on domestic walls as a child, to etching plates as a printmaker. While viewing her works one can't help but desire to touch the surface. She tactfully manages to transform the role of the viewers from a simple observes to a participant.

Her recent works were exhibited at a group show titled, 'Whispering Palette' at the ABS Gallery, Baroda. In this show paintings of various artists were coupled with poetries which if not have necessarily influenced them, but are close to them. Gohain chose two poems by Nilmani Phookan (originally in Assamese) – 'In the Green Frontiers' and 'On a Fallen Leaf'.

In the Green Frontier
In the green frontiers a gong breaks into a clangour
It's evening now over the in-extinguished pyre.

Gohain's paintings which were placed with these poems were surely not illustrations to these poems; but a common thread which ran through was of 'silence and gravity'. Beautiful- without slightest adornment, these minimal works, attested the magnificence of austerity.