Delhi-based gallery Exhibit 320 recently exhibited eminent abstract artist and designer Gopi Gajwani’s recent works titled Prayers Whispered into the Gathering Night at Sridharani Gallery in Triveni Kala Sangam, Delhi. The show featured the artist’s works painted during the last three years of pandemic. MOA reproduces poet, crtic and curator Ranjit Hoskote’s essay for this show.

 “Lucretius says that all objects release films, or ‘peeled skins’ of themselves. These intimations travel from the objects and beings around us and eventually reach our senses. But the opposite is also true: we radiate films of what we have within us and project them onto everything we see—which is how we become aware of the world and, ultimately, why we come to love it. Without these films, these fictions, which are both our alibis and the archive of our innermost life, we have no way to connect to or touch anything.”

— André Aciman, Alibis (2011) [1]

The abstractionist’s journey has never been an easy one. It demands the courage to renounce the familiar comforts of the retinally available sight or the beguilingly wrought image, the visceral appeal of the figurative, the stagecraft of narrative, and the cunning of allegory. It calls for a high degree of self-belief, a commitment to tracing one’s own routes and detours, regardless of the clamour in the public sphere, the passage of one’s contemporaries from one urgency or choice of stylistic articulation to the next. Artists who have devoted themselves to abstraction must entrust their fate to a trajectory that is inevitably punctuated by hazard and pitfall, and menaced by the perils of repetition.

For sometimes, it may appear to viewers — and, in moments of self-doubt or delirious anxiety, to abstractionists themselves — that the mandate of abstraction condemns the consciousness to a ceaseless revolving around forms that defy form, constellations of line and colour that reject the names viewers commonly attach to them. And yet, these acts of revolving are only seemingly acts of repetition.

In truth, this definitive movement of abstraction functions somewhat like the aavartan in the choreography of Kathak: a coming around to the starting point of a gesture, not to replicate it flawlessly according to a template, but to amplify and elaborate it through variation; or to compress and telescope it experimentally; or then to allow it to flower from a state of comforting sameness into a condition of dazzling unpredictability. Abstraction extends itself through such acts of departure and return; it summons forth spatial and chromatic discoveries for which there can be no readymade names or definitions.

***

Gopi Gajwani, Untitled, Charcoal on Paper, 10.5 x 9.5 in each, 2021 

Active as an artist, photographer, designer and filmmaker over a period of nearly six decades, Gopi Gajwani (born in 1938 in the town of Rohri, Sind, now in Pakistan) has always achieved his discoveries through the dissolution of the singular image. Whether he works in charcoal or acrylic, or employs pastel or Chinese ink, or renders his paintings in oils, or explores a combination of charcoal and watercolour, Gopi invites us to savour the electricity of the line that he teases into currents and stipples, into staccato rhythms and glissando sequences. He harvests fields of colour for us, which can be plangent or percussive, tranquil or flamboyant. He remains intensely aware of the prime question of legibility: How are his works to be read by those who receive them?

To this question, in ways subtle and elegant, the artist responds by pointing beyond language. Abstraction resists being relayed into words; it defies the expository and discursive procedures of interpretation. Instead, Gopi’s paintings, drawings and mixed-media works act on our consciousness as music does: we are carried along by its patterns of tempo and cadence; we surrender before the effects of syncopation and riffing; the recurrence of beats and pauses builds into a graceful architecture of solace and surprise. We may plausibly regard these paintings as pieces of music, shaped through an interplay of compositional and improvisational energies.

Reflecting on the concert of line and colour in his work, the artist has often referenced the techniques and topoi of Hindustani classical music. He likens the role of the line in his work to the aalaap, which embodies the inaugural expository phase of a raga; he has dwelled on the thrum that renders his paintings vibrant as a svara, the breath that holds a note and releases it persuasively into the air. Synaesthetic in his sensibility, Gopi has spoken of the “loudness” of colours, which he applies himself to tuning in consonance with the registers of stillness and silence. In his musical and synaesthetic emphases, he is a true heir to the pioneering abstractionist, Wassily Kandinsky, who wrote in his celebrated Concerning the Spiritual in Art (1911): “Colours are the keyboard. The eyes are the hammers. The soul is the piano with its many strings. The artist is the hand that purposively sets the soul vibrating by means of this or that key.” [2]

And yet, even as we compare Gopi’s tonalities to a scale of microtones, we are brought up short by the intensely sensuous materiality of his works when considered as pictorial surfaces. The process by which he creates his paintings involves an artisanal attentiveness to a layering of densities; he listens to the voice of each colour, whether cerulean or cobalt, vermilion or magenta, cerise or violet, viridian or ochre. As our eyes follow the shapes that float across Gopi’s surfaces, or come to anchor around focal points on his surfaces, we are captivated by the sensation of watching clouds drift in a zero-gravity space, each one paradoxically sumptuous in its lightness.

Gopi Gajwani, Untitled, Acrylic on Canvas, 30 x 30 in each, 2022

As we gaze at, and into, Gopi’s works, we find ourselves marvelling, yet again, at the infinity machine that abstraction is. Collecting the fragments of minds, objects, sense impressions and worlds into itself, forming constellations of shallow and deep, darkness and luminosity, the abstractionist painting invites us to stand apart — even if for a brief and momentarily redemptive moment — from time’s relentless onward flow, in which all things must eventually dissolve.

Reflecting on the concert of line and colour in his work, the artist has often referenced the techniques and topoi of Hindustani classical music. He likens the role of the line in his work to the aalaap, which embodies the inaugural expository phase of a raga; he has dwelled on the thrum that renders his paintings vibrant as a svara, the breath that holds a note and releases it persuasively into the air. Synaesthetic in his sensibility, Gopi has spoken of the “loudness” of colours, which he applies himself to tuning in consonance with the registers of stillness and silence. In his musical and synaesthetic emphases, he is a true heir to the pioneering abstractionist, Wassily Kandinsky, who wrote in his celebrated Concerning the Spiritual in Art (1911): “Colours are the keyboard. The eyes are the hammers. The soul is the piano with its many strings. The artist is the hand that purposively sets the soul vibrating by means of this or that key.” [2]

And yet, even as we compare Gopi’s tonalities to a scale of microtones, we are brought up short by the intensely sensuous materiality of his works when considered as pictorial surfaces. The process by which he creates his paintings involves an artisanal attentiveness to a layering of densities; he listens to the voice of each colour, whether cerulean or cobalt, vermilion or magenta, cerise or violet, viridian or ochre. As our eyes follow the shapes that float across Gopi’s surfaces, or come to anchor around focal points on his surfaces, we are captivated by the sensation of watching clouds drift in a zero-gravity space, each one paradoxically sumptuous in its lightness.

As we gaze at, and into, Gopi’s works, we find ourselves marvelling, yet again, at the infinity machine that abstraction is. Collecting the fragments of minds, objects, sense impressions and worlds into itself, forming constellations of shallow and deep, darkness and luminosity, the abstractionist painting invites us to stand apart — even if for a brief and momentarily redemptive moment — from time’s relentless onward flow, in which all things must eventually dissolve.

In the passage that forms the epigraph to this essay, André Aciman invokes the Lucretian image of the ‘peeled skins’ that objects and beings release towards one another, forming a tapestry of residues that unifies them into the same pulsating field. In considering Gopi’s life and career, we see how such a tapestry has informed the formative relationships—with teachers, with fellow artists—that have nourished this artist. As a student at the Delhi School of Art in the early decades after Independence, he received the tutelage of artist-teachers of the stature of Sailoz Mookherjea, Bhabesh Sanyal, Dhanraj Bhagat, Jaya Appasamy, and Biren De. As a young artist in Delhi, he found a community of like-minded souls who had gravitated to the Silpi Chakra, a platform for artists to meet, work, share their thoughts, and support each other through forms of collegiality—among Gopi’s fellow travellers on this path were J Swaminathan, Paramjit Singh and Arpita Singh.

Gopi Gajwani, Untitled, Acrylic on Canvas, 30.5 x 48 in, 2020

Over the years, I have been enthralled by Gopi’s calm, gentle demeanour; his courtesy and consideration; his dedication to his art and his cordial relationships with friends and colleagues. It is difficult to imagine that he carries within him, apart from such life-affirming energies, the imprinted memory of an extraordinary historical trauma. But first, a note on his childhood years. In the course of a conversation with his fellow artist Manisha Gera Baswani in 2017, Gopi spoke of his birthplace,

Rohri, which stands on the banks of the Indus, and is now in Pakistan: “This town was known for its numerous Sufi Peers and Faqirs, for their mysterious miracles that I heard [about] from my grandparents. We spoke only Sindhi, in and around the house. Hindi was foreign to us and we listened to it only through old songs on gramophone records on an ancient winding machine.” [3]

He was nine years old when this serene existence was brutally ruptured. The cataclysm of the Partition was visited upon British India, which was on the verge of Independence, and plunged the future artist and his family into diaspora. Thousands were killed in the communitarian violence that the Partition unleashed; and millions were condemned to the living death of forced migration, uprooted from home and country, left to the vagaries of fate or thrown upon the mercy of strangers.

Gopi recalls that period of intense trauma: “We held our parents’ hands and followed them to the destiny unknown. As I look back, we were told we would be walking don’t know that, nor do I have answers.” [4]

This expulsion, with its attendant disorientation and suffering, had one affirmative outcome for Gopi: “But one thing I can say for sure — I wouldn’t have been a painter or had anything to do with the world of creativity that I am enjoying with intoxication today. We had huge farms in Sind and I might have been a rich farmer. The injuries are dried and painless today, with no colour left on the wounds.” [5]

The colours have migrated from the bruise and the scar to the body of the painting; they have entered its dynamic of turning, blocking and whirling. This palette now spells out the raqgs-e bismil: the dance of those who have been deeply wounded, who have known moonless nights of anguish and supernovae of ecstasy. Gopi’s colours: might they be prayers whispered into the gathering night, sung at overcast daybreak in the ever-renewed hope of light?

Notes

1. André Aciman, Alibis: Essays on Elsewhere (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011), p. 33.

2. Wassily Kandinsky, Concerning the Spiritual in Art (trans. Michael T H Sadler; Mineola NY: Dover, 2000), p. 45. Orig. Kandinsky, Uber das Geistige in der Kunst

(Munich: Piper Verlag, 1911).

3. Gopi Gajwani, ‘Wounds of no colour’ (New Delhi, 2017). See: http://manishagerabaswani.com/gallery/gopi-gajwani/ (accessed 4 October 2022).

4. Ibid.

5. Ibid.

Courtesy: exhibit 320 and Ranjit Hoskote