Every artist is in search of his or her own particular idiom to express his or her voice, but very few of them find it. Arpita Singh is one of the fortunate few who have discovered and developed a language of their own with its particular vocabulary and grammar to voice collective and individual concerns. In her current show ‘Cobweb’ she continues to excavate her memories and environment to paint images that reflect loss, disjuncture, anxiety and even whimsy.
Asvamedha is a large triptych with each panel depicting a different emotion within the same narrative. The complex Vedic horse sacrifice, that started perhaps as a fertility ritual with the ritual enactment of intercourse between the dead horse and the chief queen and culminated as a royal proclamation by patriarchal territorial state of sovereignty and control, is reinterpreted through text and image.
Fractured topographies painted in white and pink, blue and green with red lines of rivers and blood flowing over it is populated with horses covered in pink, male figures and mounted soldiers. Words and phrases such as Death, horse, Men, Brother, Kill, Blood Red Sea, Sea blue provide a cyclical flow of reference in the background.
Her smaller works, especially the watercolours have a more intimate quality even though they too echo the sense of loss, melancholy and violence. The violence in works such as Buy Two Get Two Free is more covert and voyeuristic. Two binocular wielding men who leer at a semi-clad and naked woman are replicated zoomorphically as two vultures perched atop the composition. The commercialization of femininity and its potential availability is stressed through text.
Though the delineation of female figures is desexualized, female and male sexuality is symbolically emphasised through the bushes and other vegetative motifs. The visual impact of her painting is accentuated through the play with time and space in the imagined landscape and journey in her watecolour ‘The Guarded Stairs.’
Arpita Singh is not an avowed ideologue for post modernisms, feminism or pacifism, but her paintings are imbued with an inherent and cogent ideational structure that defocuses the centre through painterly devices such as composition, colour and texture.
— The writer is an art historian, curator and critic