ADITI SINGH

The routine of drawing a line, day in and day out, somehow makes the avalanche of days and months manageable, for if one repeats the same thing and holds steady this place in time, then it feels like time flows only on the outside.’–Aditi Singh

Thomas Erben Gallery is pleased to present so much the less complete, an exhibition of new and recent works on paper by Mumbai-based artist Aditi Singh. This is Singh’s second solo exhibition with the gallery.

A meditative and meticulously skilled artist, Singh works with tenuous media: ink, graphite, and charcoal. Using cumulative and repetitive processes, Singh builds transparency and light through density, achieving an abstraction that evokes the material and the ethereal–a recitative practice in which her applications on paper suggest an inner space of concentration and material expression.

For the works collected in so much the less complete, Singh painted, layered, and built ink in exacting, aqueous geographies. While evocative of natural processes–suggesting pools, ridges, and channels–these images and forms are actually drawn, built, and controlled through several applications of ink. The frequency of Singh’s line, repeated brushstroke after brushstroke, takes on a painterly velocity that extends over the course of a work. Though the artist keeps a time-log for each piece, documenting the layers to realise the intensity of colour, the flow of ink is very much about opening up possibilities rather than controlling them.

In contrast to East Asian Ink painting, which has developed from writing and representation, freeing itself only recently from this tradition by emphasising materiality and exploring non-representation, Singh’s practice has always been abstract. Using cumulative and repetitive processes, Singh achieves an abstraction that is not just visual in the Western sense, but carries the affect of Eastern disciplines that inform her: philosophical texts, Vedic hymns, and yoga practice. It is this interdependence between these influences and her material expression which marks Singh’s work as unique, even in the wider context of contemporary ink painting.

Minimal yet not minimalist, these new pieces articulate a charged realm: their crystalline, organic forms insinuating a struggle between balance, stasis, and continuity, where meaning is not a singular, fixed entity. Ultimately, Singh’s works unearth a kaleidoscope of vulnerabilities, uncertainties, and contradictions–as mirrored in the title of one of her pieces, the fragility of what we call civilisation–and, in doing so, perhaps impart a sense of peace over this inexorable process. Cumulative, methodical, and patient, Singh does not so much build onto paper as into it, laying down an obverse domain of line, color, space, and contemplation.