still (in parenthesis)

still (in parenthesis)

Parentheses are punctuation marks invented to denote supplemental, secondary or sidelined information in language and logic. Much of this supplemental information actually contains the “stuff” of life - that we try to make meaning of. Foregrounding these marginal gestures, this exhibition brackets a few sets of visual experiments by Prabodh Parikh crystallizing the inquisitive restlessness of a mind nourished amidst a fertile environment of artists, philosophers, poets, writers and architects over the last five decades. Working with lines and colour, mediums dry and wet, on canvases small and large, the artist generates uneven geographies of the mind within which quiet figures appear gently reposed. One sees the desire to anchor the anxiety of emergent formlessness of the drawn matter by discreet anthropomorphic punctuations that allude them as bodies or movements, made legible to the gestaltic eye. This compulsion to form an image within abstraction demonstrates the struggle to resolve (and yet remain with) the chaos of everyday life. 

The body in these abstractions traverse several states of existence - from elemental to elaborate. While loosely (dis)entangled lines sometimes themselves come together in entropic densities, at other times they sit quietly onto noisy backgrounds. Figures once alone/unattended slowly morph and coalesce into allied bodies, at other times, their communality awaits sublimation within the canvas. Through these  subtle distinctions and dissolutions, they invite the viewer into subtle acts of meditation. The drawings then are quiet interruptions, still in parentheses, that must be accommodated amid the rhythmic  choreography of a routined experience. These are conscious and subconscious states of being that map the  journey of the individual to belong to the community, and return back only to become an individual. What shapes does such travel morph us into?

The placement of a parenthesis can significantly alter the meaning of a proposition, revealing how peripheral thought comes to silently shape the centre. Parentheses hold implications, intonations, inflections, and the excesses of meaning without which the primary content is susceptible to lose its context. We often bracket aspects that are integral to life yet remain unspoken, treating them as provisional - information  that is essential but suspended. Having moved from doodles on the margins to drawings on canvases, the works in this exhibition suggest what is ostensibly marginal may be constitutive, and that meaning resides as much in the bracketed aside as in the main text. They preserve inner ideas as addenda, safeguarding what cannot be fully absorbed into the linear flow of literature or life. To engage with such subtleties requires not only seeing them with the inner eye, but learning to remain with them: the challenge is to be there, still.

Anuj Daga