POETIC VISUALIZATIONS DESPITE TROUBLED TIMES – IN TOUCH EDITION 6 PART III
Our third installment of In Touch Edition 6, takes a walk on the lyrical side. It would be fair to say that this segment of the In Touch Edition 6 looks at the artists and galleries who present artwork that stirs up a topical conversation without losing their emotional and poetic potential.
We begin by looking at works being promoted by one of the leading names, Vadehra Art Gallery presents artist Gigi Scaria’s No Stone Unturned, a collection of works by the artist exploring architectural positivity and liminal landscapes through the life and times of the people purporting its shared narratives. His work is not always ‘positive’ as it invokes a subtle sarcasm about what is considered ‘progress’ and in the current scenario such debates are quite important to engage in. Scaria pursues his compositions through mixed imagery that tread the fine line between being informative and imaginative, hence maintaining a predictive quality that both enhances or diminishes the potential of a cultural moment.
In this latest body of watercolours on paper that are part of the series No Stone Unturned, Scaria’s environmental concerns find minimalist expression as seeds of ideas yet to germinate into full-blown consciousnesses therein prompting further elaboration, as he contemplates the systemic and cyclical friction between natural and man-made spaces.
In a topical vein, he further explores themes of restricted freedoms and curtailed movements, but more importantly considers the storytelling potency of landscapes as hinged on narratives of the human condition and action. Scaria asks, “How will people, and the future, receive information about our times?” To authenticate this predicament, he creates poetic visualizations of encroachment, overwhelm and in-flux boundaries, presenting these premises as fable-like futures encompassed in inconclusive alterity.
Presented by Galerie Mirchandani + Steinruecke, artist Aji V.N. presents a series of haunting untitled drawings done in red chalk on paper, of moody yet calm seascapes and skies meeting at the horizon forming diverse abstract patterns. Coaxed out of a haze of red chalk, the twelve new works on paper made specially for In Touch Edition 6 convey an atmosphere that hovers between tranquility and disquiet. Whether these landscapes are menacing or enchanted is to a certain extent irrelevant because as the artist explains, his drawings are largely hermetic and concerned principally with a series of formal moves. An investigation into the picture-making possibilities of line, form, tone, dimension, presence, distance, and illusion, carry his interest from one work to the next level.
Aji V.N. (born 1968) was trained as a painter in Trivandrum and New Delhi but coming to the Netherlands in 2000, he began drawing in earnest and, he explains, he became fascinated with the technical and expressive possibilities of charcoal in particular. He was concerned with the materiality of the work — interested in building a pictorial world from dust, almost in a metaphysical sense. Building upward from the dust is a good imagery that speaks of our times.
Green Art Gallery is a contemporary art space located in Dubai’s Alserkal Avenue. They present the work of Maryam Hoseini, who explores the concept of ruins in a politicized social space. In her works that are created out of acrylic, ink and pencil on wood panels, Hoseini captures empty historical echoes, as bodies walk among the literal and figurative, the visible and invisible ruins of objects and architectures.
In the context of the censored female figure, Hoseini presents her subjects as nude, cast simultaneously as unrealistically flattened diagrams of the human body. While the sections are ‘hyper-realistic’, they are also ‘disembodied’ limbs covered in hair. Her recent work is made up of multiple fragments, strategically balanced upon one another and anchored into the wall behind at a single point, where she builds her ongoing curiosity in space.
The sequence is a formula for a narrative where she confronts her viewers perception, preoccupation and projections of identity. These interjections within the gallery’s white cube serve as a way in which the artist rebuilds and elevates these fractured stories, now sturdily supported with weighted columns of opaque colour.
Last but definitely not least, Tradition & Beyond, presents a selection of specially curated old textile and paper works from the collection of Pooja Singhal the founder of Atelier Tradition & Beyond.
The concern and gallery were set up in an atelier format in 2009. In the last ten years the focus of the atelier and its founder Pooja Singhal has been to sustain and revive traditional techniques and the artist community, take the century old art form, maintain its ethos and push the boundaries to bring out something within it that is aesthetically and culturally relevant today. The Gallery at The Lodhi is the perfect showcase of works largely made by the atelier. It also becomes a space to exhibit the collections of old and heritage pieces we have acquired over the years from the artist community.
It would be accurate to say that this segment presented a variety to the art viewing audience ranging from that which is calming and pleasant to artwork that subtly gets under one’s skin to make difficult and not entirely comfortable points and arguments. Overall, it adds to the variety of online viewing experience that is synonymous with the In Touch Series.
Text by Georgina Maddox
Image courtesy: All the galleries and artists featured for In Touch Series
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