The rustling, filigree like work at Vadehras invites your gaze and stare. In the quietude of her silent style, Arpita Singh has emerged as one of the most important international contemporary painters working today. Her recent works on canvas, and a brilliant series of watercolours on paper echoes the majestic moods of the high
priestess of Indian art. Close up, though, her tower of titles and ideas resemble a riot of objects and roots in the tropical forest of many short stories of reality.
“My paintings are about reality, about what surrounds us everyday,” says she, in an exclusive to The Asian Age last week. Reality cannot be forgotten, we have to face it, and I think finally it creates its images around us. To step into the world of Arpita Singh is to step into her aura as a creator. And what an astonishing array of intricacies await the viewer.
The watercolours create a corollary of a thousand things. Compressed within the frame are a carpet of millions of characters. Magician is a dab hand at unexpected couplings — life-size latticework humans mix, with a backdrop of crowded embellished floatsams. The colour of the watercolours have a facile and festooned charisma.
The human figures in Arpita’s hands are always sitting and they have a sinuous compactness that is heady. Her trademark has always been the juxtaposition of modern day kitsch and the mundane with religious contexts, high art, and advertising one liners.
She also evokes a modernist mood of contemporary art. Woven into the Arpita signature of deeply detailed nuances are words, dates, months and even a cute and cosy series of Clouds 1-9. Piquant indeed the manner in which she fast forwards the imagery of the Shanti Parva from the Mahabharata into Five Women and Three Hawks. How do seated women turn into melancholic angels, waiting till eternity?
“I have always felt life is about waiting. And in that time of waiting, life passes us and so many things happen,” says Arpita. The consistent element in her art is that no image is too banal and no hierarchy relevant. “I have never felt inhibited about crossing invisible lines into advertising, design, the decorative arts or architecture,” she says. “But now I know that we artists can go as far as we want into the real world, because it is the real world that offers us subjects,” she says.
At Vadehras, the most powerful work is The Listeners. “Who wrote the poem?” she asks in candidness. And when the name of Walter De La Mare is supplied she smiles a silent smile. The textures and intricate handling of this work is heady and haunting. It is almost as if the thickness and weave of the cloth was woven with her own hands. “Sometimes, I begin with an entirely different thought and when I start working, it becomes something else. I think its about what lies within and what the hands wants to say.”
At first glance, each work seems to be an exercise in intellectual conversations, but look deeper and you inhale pure exuberance of style and substance. In her oil paintings as well as her smaller watercolors, one finds modern day objects like aeroplanes, dates, birds, pipes and even a custard apple, holding court like ceremonial talismans as the dates or alphabets dance within the margins of the frame. “Dates are what we live by,” says she, “Our lives are dictated by dates.” And you understand that, within the psyche of brilliant wit is her equivocal and allegorical insight into life and its disparate elements rendered in a brilliant candy-colored palette. Of course the presence of a classmate from Lady Irwin School, going as far back as Class 5 brings to mind the schoolgirl as well as memories of picture books from primary school. What stands out in this nearly sold out show are the human figures that inhabit these iconic spaces. The show brims with wit and irony. The female bra becomes a part of compositional clarity in Buy Two,Get Two Free. She laughs and says we see it always. What endears, however, is the manner in which she recreates the imagery and the mood with trendy accuracy and charismatic countenances — the fleshy femmes being as much engaging and happy in their bargain.
The humans this time are both young and old. Between the magic of sagging folds of flesh and furrowed brows, and mature adults we also see men and women as mythic monoactors who act out their exits and entrances . And it is the unravelling of Arpita’s intent that makes her viewer stand witness to the private burdens of the lived life. Cowering nude bodies showered with dark furrows, many women peering out from beneath a veil of angst, another women revealing her organs twisted like knotted roots, a middle-aged man wearing a crumpled shirt can be an external revelation of an internal anxiety.
“I think we are always negotiating a balance between the joys and perils that complicate our daily lives, but it isn’t always like that,” says Arpita, always managing to retain her impish and youthful sense of humor. Strange, how when confronted with the prospect of growing elderly, one woman dons a hot pink brassiere and little else while another flashes the viewer a bit of leg as each refuses to relinquish hold of a waning sexuality. Aesthetics and intensity of thought also serve to heighten the solemnity of her works by adding character to each composition. What never ceases to amaze are the ability to create rich surface textures, intense saturation of colour, flattened perspective and decorative motifs. Through Cobweb, Arpita Singh invites us to share a vision of the world even as she embraces hope and happiness, recollections and reflections, fear and endless wait.