Exit Only, No Exit / No Entry, Entry Only: Shreyas Karle

Project 88 is pleased to present Exit Only, No Exit / No Entry, Entry Only, Shreyas Karle’s fourth solo exhibition at our gallery space in Mumbai. With over 95 drawings, paintings, notebooks, and archival material – primarily from CONA, a foundation he co-runs with his partner Hemali Bhuta – this show marks a signi?cant, even surprising shift (or recoil) in Karle’s practice, one that began during the pandemic. With the onset of a lockdown, the artist moved homes to Goa, and in this transition, banal objects were unwittingly inscribed with an uncanny presence, an echo of their former abode perhaps, prompting Karle to constantly – even restlessly – rearrange items in this new house. As curator Nida Ghouse notes in her prose:

 

“His compulsion to constantly rearrange interior space on the shifting axes of temperature and time transforms still life into landscape painting. It all begins, he claims, with a feeling that something is amiss, or not where it should be, with seeing what isn’t there, but could be. He imagines it ?rst and wonders if it would work. That is to say, it’s a mental image, that either comes to him or which he projects, but then he goes ahead and transposes reality onto it. We are already dealing with at least two planes. Can the surface of a drawing hold both of them? Or what does the drawing want from him?” [1]

 

As you enter the gallery, the white cube morphs into the familiar space of a classroom, large notice-boards envelop the walls, with raw, exposed paintings gently pinned on their surface. A shrunken, small black chalkboard holds a drawing of Karle’s bizarre title in a grid – Exit Only, No Exit / No Entry, Entry Only – with smudged letters. One table contains archives from the artist’s pedagogical projects, sketchbooks and imagined stories composed with his daughter, whereas another table holds a single artwork amongst a series of empty frames, almost as though their companion paintings have stepped outside, momentarily. Or perhaps, the frames themselves now assume the identity of an art object. In another corner, discarded fragments cut out from the artist’s earlier paintings come together to form a new singular work titled Graveyard of accidental deaths. Every detail of the display and artworks is precise, deliberate, and typical of Karle’s whimsical oeuvre, wherein objects aren’t what they appear to be. 

 

Encountering Karle’s art is often like entering a strange perceptive puzzle, as the constellations of our ordinary signifiers are shuffled, and at times, juxtaposed with the unknown – spaces of contingency, chance, and the passage of time. As the artist muses, “[…]one is always looking elsewhere, with the possibility of discovering an accidental leftover.”[2] What is more, these puzzles are constructed with no predetermined final image – or meaning – to build towards, for the individual objects themselves soon morph into further puzzles, or questions, as the artist relentlessly pushes the borders of what we see and its necessary negative, what escapes our visual ?eld. These meticulous configurations of mundane objects appear mystical, as containers of secrets out of our grasp, yet within our line of sight. As the artist foretells, each entry might also be an exit, or perhaps, it’s the other way round. Karle conjures a playful interstice at the threshold of the real, imaginary, and symbolic, one that provokes a deeper way of seeing – you must read closely, but you cannot trust the details. 

 

________________________