VIPEKSHA GUPTA     

Shadows in the River of Time

 

Sabbe sankhara anicca

​

Blueprint12, New Delhi

 

This teaching from the Pali canon of early Buddhism assures us bleakly that all created things are impermanent, shadows in the river of time. As are we ourselves, with our tangled de sires, anxieties, hopes and dreams. And yet, as the practice of vipassa na or mindfulness demonstrates, we can find a way beyond the cease less rush-hour traffic of thoughts and sensations. By bearing detached witness to their ebb and flow, liberating ourselves from their affective and cognitive claims, we might achieve inward stillness as well as a balanced relationship with the world. Vipeksha Gupta’s exquisite works in her debut solo, ‘Oscillations’, re cord such a cultivation of mindfulness. Her formal choices attest to a meditative absorption in the rhythms of process, and demonstrate an elegant economy of means. Her works are achieved sometimes with graphite alone, sometimes through a combination of graphite and charcoal. The palette is a spectrum of greys laid, flecked and scintillat ing, across the paper surface. At one end, they gather into deep densi ties of black, evocative of jet and carbon. At the other end, they open up to a dawning white, calibrated between shade and glare. Vipeksha’s method oscillates between the incremental and the unpre dictable. She generates her graphic surfaces through the reiteration of microcosmic units into patterns while dynamizing them through strik ing gestures of rupture, incision, schism, or slippage. She evokes tablets of epiphany, creates folds and hinges of light around which darkness pivots and ripples. Her approach might be described as minimalist, with this proviso: like most forms of minimalism, its austerity is decep tive. On closer engagement, it reveals an understated sensuousness, an invitation both to touch and gaze. How do we contextualise Vipeksha’s work? Her art is nourished by several lineages within global abstraction. We find, here, references to Malevich’s dance of the black square, mediating between image and absence; to Barnett Newman’s zip, a revelation of light ripping through a field of colour to confront the viewer; to Fontana’s incision, slash ing through the flatness of the everyday to offer a glimpse of infinity. Within Indian abstraction, Vipeksha stakes a persuasive claim to that extraordinary lineage best embodied by Nasreen Mohamedi and Mehlli Gobhai – artistic imaginations preoccupied with subtle geometries of repeated mark and resistant void, the archetypal play of illumination and eclipse, the fluctuating relationship of consciousness to a cosmos that is both manifest and inscrutable.

 

-Ranjit Hoskote