“Down, down, down. Would the fall never come to an end? ‘I wonder how many miles I’ve fallen by this time?’ [Alice] said aloud. ‘I must be getting somewhere near the centre of the earth… [or] shall I fall right through the earth?’”Lewis Carroll. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland: 150th Anniversary Edition (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton University Press): 8.
Encountering a strange creature - the White Rabbit, impeccably dressed with a pocket watch, but in a hurry- Lewis Carroll’s protagonist, Alice, follows him instinctively into a “large rabbit-hole under the hedge.” As she falls, Carroll conjures an otherworldly landscape underground, where perspectival realism collapses under the slightest point of stress; here, time slows down, spatial proportions twist askew, and the depths of the earth exhume distorted relics of modernity. This precise moment (and movement) - a free fall into the unfamiliar - becomes a simultaneous point of entry (and exit) into Amitesh Shrivastava’s eerie, immersive, and luminous painterly compositions. Comprising six life-sized diptychs, Rabbit Hole forges a sensorial adventure: textured hues of blues, browns, and blood red appear to obscure a source of light, a lingering abyss rendered visceral. But if one moves closer, these pixels saturate, and the image dissolves.
Carroll’s novel resonated deeply with the Surrealist movement in the late 1910s, perceived through their raison d’être: distortions of space, time, logic, and rationality. Whereas Surrealism seeks warped visuals of the ordinary, or the familiar, Shrivastava’s canvases reckon with a different, even opposite impulse; his paintings do not distort our reality, but pierce deliberately into its core - uncoiling the perceptual apparatus that negotiates meaning in our outer and inner worlds. The artist begins with a singular gesture, laboriously weaving layers that move despite their stillness: subjects and objects disappear and emerge, as the horizon - like our psyche - remains unstable, inscrutable, and often, outside our line of control. Out here, Shrivastava reminds us that the seemingly disjointed visuals, or abstracted landscapes, are indeed, the closest to our lived experience of this world - not the other way round. Rabbit Hole plunges viewers into corporeal depths, seen through the mirror of dense, macabre, and compelling artworks.
-Sonali Bhagchandani
