BIRAAJ DODIYA

Simultaneously straddling ideas of ruination and form, Dodiya’s work is rooted in metaphors within the subject of landscape. A relentless construction, deconstruction and improvisation of materials leads to the final form of recent paintings and sculptures on view in the exhibition. The surfaces of Dodiya’s paintings are dense, layered and textured, created through a constant process of removal and reapplication of paint, much akin to landscape which could also be a charged space for erasure and the violence of time. For Dodiya there is no landscape without ruin, there is no body without failure and she remains interested in constructing this liminal space – the meeting point between the sublime image, and the inherent ruin in it.

Large abstract oil paintings are installed alongside wooden painted planks and steel ‘anchor plate’ sculptures, titled Interludes that sit at the juncture between painting and sculpture and are closely linked with how the paintings are made and viewed. The paintings develop much like an excavation site with extended processes of layering and digging. Ultimately, the work becomes a record of its own upended language. The painted surface continues into the sculptures, like repair or sealing with material that forms protective skins, where the planks combined with paintings, stand like signposts and visual beams, existing between two worlds, touching both floor and wall, sky and earth. Dodiya is interested in the physical interaction between the viewer and the work. The planks become her medium to construct a play between surface and ground, verticality and gravity, that mirror the tectonic uncertainty of the paintings. The steel ‘anchor plates’ looming over the space, painted or bandaged, work as abstract glyphs, trying to interrupt the space like weighted drawings. Inspired by architectural devices often visible on the exteriors of walls in medieval towns or earthquake-prone cities, they repair and preserve, like systems one develops to prevent collapse. Here they are interludes; they are the bones.