The Avid Gaze
Chemould Prescott Road
Mumbai
2008
Thus far Kiyomi Talaulicar’s pictorial quiet has found itself placed slap bang in the middle of abstraction. But with The Avid Gaze (2008), one intends to relocate her works in the pacifist idiom. That said, no effort has been directed towards entirely uprooting her linkages with abstraction. The two dispositions coexist, and allow the artist’s new body of work to be read in a manner more vigorous than that allowed by mere rhetorical exchanges, which labour unendingly over matters of luminosity and other such.
Pacifism, of course, is easier said than done. And in Talaulicar’s quasi-abstract still-lifes we witness this tussle, followed by a steady migration towards equilibrium. With the application of each restrained layer, the artist endeavours to countervail pessimism and other signs of discord that may have inflected her milieu, her temperament, and subsequently her work. At the end of this fairly longwinded route, Talaulicar’s paintings appear as though they have been cured by the sun and roundly weathered by the biosphere.
Since the politics of the personal was first thrown into relief, we have rarely encountered a dearth of anti-war sentiments in the contemporary arts, both Indian and otherwise. At the nucleus of Talaulicar’s work rests the philosophy of pacifism, which announces itself as restraint in the business of everyday life. In her practice, the artist conveys this trajectory by yielding to her creative instinct. Surrender is critical to all artistic progress and process but often this natural arc is disrupted when foresight is blockaded by the temptation to fall in line with faddish and aggressive manoeuvres. Talaulicar chases this principal plot of capitulation with an eye that gathers details.
Gitanjali Dang
Seeking paradise
Moonlight prophecy
The turning
Nightfall
Always
Together in black & white
Pages
Unfading, 1
Shadow play
White light
Unfading, 2
Abode
Abode, 2
Abode, 3
Abode, 4
Abode, 5
Liquid light
The silent rush
Endgame
Receptacle
Illumination
Flowers on my path
Written in stone
Vessel
Wander
Greece
Memoir
Water story
Radiance
Stone glow
Scripture
Event Photos & Memorabilia
The avid gaze
Exhibition picture, 1
Exhibition picture, 2
Exhibition picture, 3
Exhibition picture, 4
Exhibition picture, 5
Exhibition picture, 6
Exhibition picture, 7
Exhibition picture, 8
Exhibition picture, 9
Concept note by Gitanjali Dang