Frieze London 2020 | Viewing Room

Project 88 and Galerie 88 present a collation of works, which brings together the many approaches to  materiality. Paintings become grounds of possibilities of colours with open modalities of making, where the maker and the made are in a process and the tangents of the haptic and the optic meet. The  collection looks at painting as a labour of deep affection and attention: colour becomes part of the  matter-flow,  connoting both material and emotions where perceptible things and the act of perceiving are on the same plane.

In Velu Vishwanadhan’s works abstraction as an idea arrives through the contemplative  understanding of nature, a disengaged vision of colours and shapes,  explaining nothing. The momentary ephemeral nature is put forth by the artist for his mobile spectator. The space is built and the forms are less strictly bound by gravity without a clear difference of above or below, or the perspectives of back and forth, added with new beginnings and irregular closures.

 Prabhakar Kolte uses his surroundings as a raw material which can be worked on. Forms pulsate, appear and disappear in the screen of colours, either hidden or revealed partly. Vividly coloured grounds carry different shapes or indefinite forms. The canvas becomes the ground for tachisme: stains, drips, and the materialism of paint as a medium is the mainstay. His canvases reveal his own experiences of things, the magic of making. 

Sandeep Mukherjee’s Fabric Diagram’s are haptic experiences produced through palimpsests involving the artist’s body and it’s interaction with the material.  Gestures of the body are written large on these. The works consist of the continuum of the artist through his material which includes collating of shapes, selecting the physical experiences and creating retinal spaces which sutures the viewers into it. 

Neha Choksi’s works open up dialogues between the medium, the material and the artist. She parallels geographic tectonic shifts to that of the artistic process, drawing associations with the earthly crumbling and folding to that of creative manipulations of the canvas surfaces. She probes deeper into the  materialism of colours as pigments which are derived by rummaging the earth and at the same time  providing visual pleasure.

Amitesh Shrivastav’s paintings challenge demarcated spaces, grounds collapse and everything is in a flux. The solid forms melt into daubs, strokes and dots of wide and short marks defying any lexical  meaning. They allow the viewers to be in between the vanishing act of forms and the sensorial  experiences of colour pigments. Brushstrokes break in visual rhapsodies of a painter. Forms are there as suggestions refusing narrations and pulling the audience in a medley of tenors of a painter’s actionism. 

Mahesh Baliga’s paintings speak of the melting time, memories of travels, of places and people lost in maladies of their own. Colours ,laid in layers in tempera become fine lenses capturing the sublimity of  human mind ,the violence, the reclusiveness .The sweeping brushmarks become waves, the crimson spread all over simulates blood, and the disordered speech gets absorbed by the blue and green  soliloquies of the sea . Colours are no more the medium but the punctum.

-Dr. Aparna Roy Baliga