Public space in India runs to its own rhythm. Cities are creatively occupied, their uses shift by day and night according to a vibrant spatial imagination that, as Swati Chattopadhyay recognises, can form a counterpoint to the desires of state.1 For irrespective of government attempts across Indian cities to limit purported 'visual chaos', the city's infrastructure bears the marks of its inhabitants; walls are canvases for political sloganeering, social messages, adverts, gods and goddesses. And through these passages, people crowd to celebrate pujas, mount protests and partake in processions that turn public space into sites of spectacle and sensorial extravagance.
Gaurav Gupta abstracts this city, its motion and musicality. In an evocation of his family home in Lokhandwala, he paints from the memories of the street beneath that coursed with activity and permeated his home. Sounds fed themselves through his windows. 'You couldn't not hear what was happening on the streets", he explains. This aural sensitivity and alertness has led Gupta to consider his mark making as having audio qualities. Operating as visual soundbites, like a musical annotation, each records aspects of the constant thrum and ricocheting of this city's sound in his room. In Confluence (2023), a two-part monumental painting, where shapes recoil into themselves, stretch and flex, are the suggestions of sparks and sonic bursts from firecrackers, clashes of symbols and strikes of drums. The soundscape bristles with the anticipation of the people who create it.
Transposing the metropolis through its sounds, Gupta makes connections between his large-scale works with a painterly ostinato. A broad orange sweep holds each of the paintings—Flock, Confluence, Sanctuary, and _Meander—_together. The soft contours of this form are created through Gupta's additive painting process that places value on incorporating the act of creation into the very representation itself. Often using a constricted palette, with just two or three base colours in acrylic and oil, Gupta applies his thinned pigment with a range of implements including rags, brushes, sponges and his hands. Laying his canvas on the floor, from a heightened position, Gupta experiments slowly in real time making visually transparent his deliberations: colours are mixed and remixed directly, marks get made, wiped out, covered over and condensed. Some streaks leak into each other, on occasion his gestures splutter or flourish like calligraphic strokes.
Although the effect is one of spontaneity, Gupta's lyricism is deeply considered and his marks have been shaped by an accumulation of visual references. As alluded to in the exhibition's title, he folds together many traditions. The representational qualities of Gond art sit with the fly away gestural washes of artist Fiona Rae, the supple lines of Kalighat paintings, the intensity of S.H. Raza's palette and the perspectival and colour characteristics of Mughal miniatures. This should not be readily apparent. The works are slow to unfurl. Take Sanctuary (2022), a clustered work of tight curls and churning colour with no obvious place for the eye to rest. In structure it takes from the Mughal convention of working with a flattened aerial perspective. Gupta's derivative lack of central focal point encourages a roving eye and the visual ingestion of the whole work, all at once.
Gupta's micro works similarly do away with a distinct beginning or an end. The Entwined series (2023), sinuous masses of blue hues accented with flecks of fiery colour, explores the intense physicality of the city where bodies cannot but mingle and often the individual is lost to the group. Working with these relatively extreme contrasts in scale, Gupta accentuates the strength and comparatively equal weight of the group of works. Through the changes in density, the loosening and tightening of his gestures along with the deepening and diluting of colour, Gupta achieves an effectual visual blast with a subtle indeterminacy that compels one to listen, look and linger.
Press release courtesy Jhaveri Contemporary. Text: Dr. Cleo Roberts-Komireddi.
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