From the group exhibition Quiet Conversations from the Courtyard, curated by Rekha Rodwittiya at Ashvita, Chennai – 2012
When we share our art we open ourselves in all our raw and tender state, to communicate from the core of our inner being. It is how we make friends, a process where we join a million others who have believed in the potential of human creativity to enrich the larger experiences of life and most importantly, human bonding. I have spent the past two years as an artist-in-residence at the Collective Studio in Baroda and through this passage of time, art has been the essential factor of sharing, dialogue and interdependence. My interest in painting the human figure is perhaps determined by these spaces where interaction with people is of the greatest value and where notions of the self and the other begin to blur; a hundred women walking can also be a hundred journeys of the self.
I believe in the power of imagination. As I paint many seated figures in one painting, I recall elaborate epic friezes from the temple complexes of Angkor Wat. Devotion and faith are exemplified in every inch of detail carved in these stones, to remain as ineffaceable testimonies of art; a space where art and divinity are synonymous. Practice and discipline are invariably associated with the everyday and the mundane, but when a musician is able to move someone to tears during a performance, the seven notes that are played everyday seem to bring out a whole new world of experience.
I listen to the news and notice how easily truth is hijacked and manipulated, for personal and political gain. Does it finally remain to be the truth? When love and hatred are disguised in political diplomacy, are we able to perceive it? When violence is dressed in beauty, is it then more bearable? I am bewildered each time I look at images from battle scenes of miniature paintings— the image of a beheaded body and the fountain of blood spurting out of a dying warrior— the beauty of these depictions surreptitiously draws me into its violence. Beauty and refinement are catalysts that provoke the viewer towards a deeper perception of oneself. Each moment in our studio is spent in seeking what we believe to be truthful… it must make our lives more meaningful.
The intensity of everyday visuals in a city like Mumbai never fails to impact me on each visit. On a by-lane, I saw a little girl performing a tight-rope walk to entertain a crowd; a task that would have earned her the next meal….
…I feel privileged to watch her from my taxi window and contemplate on a painting I would make on returning to my studio in Baroda. The following is a stanza from a Chinese poem that I have selected for this exhibition as a point of imaginative departure.
This time, the second time I have come,
I dream no more the vastness.
With hands behind my back,
I walk from one end to the other
I am thinking —
How can so slight a thread tie up a city?
-Lin Ling
Malavika Rajnarayan 