The visible versus the constructed
"There is something about the physical immediacy of painting that still engages us. It might be likened to being alone in a darkened space with your own image, a situation in which you are forced to recognize something within your own subconscious."

- Peter Nagy, Paths of Progression, August 2005

The choice to adhere to paintings for the 12 contemporary artists represented in this exhibition is indeed a critical one - it represents a conscious decision for each of them to return to a genre which has defined each of these artists even as their paths have weaved through various media and concepts.

Their commonality as a group, despite their individual creative introspection, converges on the viewer and his/her response. These artists pose a series of questions that engage rather than simply document or create. They question their environment, their values, the very currency of their existence.

The purposeful sense of uncertainty and change that pervades the paintings by this group is constructed in individual spheres for each artist. It stretches from the literal such as Subodh Gupta's photo-realist imagery of a commercial center for kitchen utensils that pushes into a distorted view of the subject. The thread runs through T.V. Santosh's almost-neon, dichromatic images of a disturbing reality. The gamut spans photo-realist use of images such as in Bose Krishnamachari's situational narratives and emerges passively through Shibu's surreal snapshots of a moment captured. As Jitish stretches his use of metaphor across his canvas, he shifts this realism to a more graphic image, allowing a completely different construction. We then begin to move towards Jayashree Chakravorty with her superimposed line drawings that create a sense of chaos among an ordered set of images, leading us to Rajneesh Kaur's layering of paint in bold colors with simplified forms and finally to Anjum Singh's push towards a colorist's structure of impressionist imagery. The viewer is allowed to traverse the line which runs through this set of contemporary narratives, constructing a personalized sense of what is both immediately visible and that which is self-constructed in a personal context.

These paintings have transported us to a juncture where we can choose direction, where we can shape our perception and where we can question how to move forward. This group of artists have provided us with an alternate view in a time when we are often drowned in the immediacy of the real-time of new media - what more can we ask of the art of contemporary society…from contemporary India as it determines its own frame of reference in a global society.

In supporting the objectives of this art, we hope it offers this view, not only to an audience in each of the 4 cities where the exhibition will be shown, but also to a global audience.

MINAL VAZIRANI, SaffronArt
DINESH VAZIRANI, SaffronArt
RENU KHILNANI, Bodhi Art