ART MUMBAI 2024

Hayward’s tripartite paintings, that combine oil paint, sticks and pastel techniques, are underpinned by rhythmic conventions associated with rave music. As this culture remixes music samples, Hayward looks to different artistic movements and textile traditions reworking them to create his modular compositions which are often then resampled in future works as if creating an ongoing musical loop.

In Too Nice, Play It Twice (The Park) No 2 (2024), a spectrum of styles, chronologically and geographically distinct, as well as textures are converged. The hardened, repetitive shapes associated with Vorticism, Constructivism, Bauhaus and Suprematism inform the upper part of the composition. This contrasts with the lower painted section that draws on the strokes and scene from Eduard Vuillard’s The Park alongside a characterful three-dimensional motif. This abstracted pattern, a fusion of artist David Bomberg’s iconography and a Cameroonian textile, is created from tiny fragments of oil stick applied with the edge of a scalpel then scored to mimic fine stitches of thread.

Hayward’s visual structure can be considered parallel to musical composition, with the different sections functioning like parts of a melody. Gaurav Gupta similarly regards his paintings as possessing an innate musicality. He describes his marks as ‘visual sound bytes’: each stroke, created by a range of methods including sponge and fingers, is suggestive of a distinct aural quality. When combined in dense layers, like in Underneath (2024), there is both an intensity and continuity of forms that are, for Gupta, reflective of the types of polyrhythmic mixes associated with electronic ambient and intelligent dance music.

The tropes of Indian classical music are furthermore prompts from Gupta. Works like Diaphane (2024) are constructed following a cyclical structure akin to these conventions where matras are repeated in a cycle from beginning to end. Following this logic, his painting technique often comes full circle with the last step, adding primer to the canvas, the same as his first