Saraf's paintings are like poetic visions in which the land and its people act as catalysts for her imagination and emotions. Plucking some of her figures and forms from Indian miniature traditions, the artist re-casts them into ever changing mediums and situations in narrative paintings that assert their capacity for new adventures and journeys.
Read MoreHer material is at times tie-dyed, at others sprayed with gold spangles, or studded with starry thumbtacks. The eccentric selection of her cast of characters: actors, angels, soothsayers, masked clowns, acrobats, skeletons, moon walkers and a host of others, when assembled in groups, often has an enduring frieze-like quality.
At other times they are reminiscent of the participants of a traveling circus or of an itinerant Jatra theatre, captured as if mid-performance in the lingering spotlight of the ages. Through her use of draftsmanship, of pattern and design, of color and painterliness, Saraf creates a layered world of dream, memory and imagination. Each work seems to shut out everything except the experience of that particular instant of viewing in something like an Alice in Wonderland slipping-through-the-looking-glass moment.
