INDIA ART FAIR 2019

In an email dated Dec. 22, 2018, Aditi writes about her recent work...

‘The painting Storm Warnings (after Adrienne Rich), which has taken me a year to resolve, is as much about the intimacy of relationships as it’s about the intensity of a single hue.

In all my work, I begin with drawing a circle first, repeating it layer after layer, moving from transparency to density. It is this unending layering that catches and holds me in its grip. Often there is no inner or outer surface of the picture plane, there is simply a pulse, a vibration if you may. I think essentially what painting wants is a connection. It needs to matter to you personally, intuitively, sensually, before there is any question of meaning.

Choosing paper and ink is paramount to how an image unfolds. With Kozo and Washi paper, because of its organic quality, one has to relinquish control right away. It’s so quick to absorb every gesture that the making is in the moment; speed is of the essence. Yupo paper, which is polyester, is the opposite: everymark is deliberate and every line delineated. It’s like working with two different beings. Each demands attention of a different kind; one liberates colour, while the other contains it.

What draws me into each process is how line, colour, and space can become a field, a force, a movement. You can step into a painting and simply flow, or you can enjoy working out its vagaries. It’s simply about organising one’s experience as a reader of the visual and the visceral. There is no one kind of understanding, as there is no one kind of pleasure.

One begins with certain intentions, choice of material, but those are simply tools of a process. What happens in a closed room between the paper and the hand is ultimately rather mysterious to me. I’m at a place where I see painting not as something to do, but as time spent in a discipline that unites my attention and has the possibility to exceed its own subject. T.S. Eliot once said, ‘no one is born with infallible discrimination. Genuine taste is founded on genuine feeling. Your taste for poems is related to all your other loves. It affects them, is affected by them, and will be limited as oneself is limited.’ Holds true for painting too.’