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ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONS One of Sheetal’s works

Sheetal Gattani is a Mumbai-based artist, well acknowledged nationally for her distinct abstract paintings. A Mumbaikar, living in a densely populated urban space, a megapolis capable of drowning and overwhelming one’s sensibilities with visual and aural stimuli, she produces paintings that are a complete polarity to her ambient environs. Transcending the material chaos, she is able to open up the space to find a haven in her inner world, focusing on this reality to create a corpus of works that remain truly original and innovative.

Encountering and confronting her abstracts, one is left puzzled, since they are not a confusion of splash of colours, in an attempt at ‘representing’ the celebration of the life of her city. The question that begs is how does one appreciate or ‘look’ at an abstraction that defies the very concept of extracting the essence of mimetic reality to present the essentials. Nothing of this is made evident in Sheetal’s works. Her frames come across as structures of quiet breathing colours and spaces which are psychosemiotic and not old fashioned formalism. The practice of artistic creation is both a movement towards the production of meaning and an inscription of a play beyond communicable meaning that is evocative at other levels than the communicative. This is where Sheetal signposts her singularity embedded as she is within the matrix of her culture, creating her own version of abstraction that offers myriad possibilities of its explorations.

Sheetal’s process of creation, largely conditions the nature and character of her works. The paintings Sheetal produces are the labour of love and involvement very intimately connected with the movement of vision in space and body. Yet there are no gestural evidences of brush strokes or any other traces or mark on the surface of her works. Sheetal clarifies this depersonalisation as “I feel almost egoistic leaving my marks or traces of the brush strokes on the paper.” The material she predominantly employed was black paper on which she brushed on layers of paint washes, in complete communion with it. Through a process which she terms as ‘tortured by paper or canvas’, which challenges and excites her at the same time, she works on her colours in many layers. Sheetal builds up layers and layers of thin paint [twelve sometimes] that in the end leaves an illusive impression of her self, in which she has lived metaphorically to gently push her moments to make them live on the paper. Her works create an effect of palimpsest by covering the paper with another or piling layered paint to build up the image of her unconditional self. But this poised character is deceptive since a dynamic tension exists in the layered colours that create its own life and spirit, unique to her individuated experiences at the moment of encounter with it. The exhibition is on at Gallery Sumukha until March 10.

ASHRAFI S. BHAGAT

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