CHROMAZONE

 

When my good friend Brinda asked me to write a few lines about her new body of work 'ChromaZone' I was slightly uncertain where to begin as I hadn't physically viewed the work having seen them only as jpgs. Also, every time we meet we end up mostly exchanging laughter than swap notes on art. Viewing the colourful new paintings on the computer I didn’t want to either overemphasize or understate Brinda’s ‘mischerious’ (I mean mischievous and serious- “Brinda you bring weird words out of me”) engagement with colour, texture and tonalities, where direct retinal engagement with the piece is central to one’s satisfactory reading of it.

Of course as screenagers we are somewhat adept at ignoring what is lost in pixilation, and reach for the core intentions of the work before us. With this new body of work it is somewhat self-evident that Brinda wishes to wrestle with the basic tool-bar of painterly options. She seems to let the rigid make peace with the fluid, actively overlaying slippery drips and colour strips in a bid to find order within a space of a self-inflicted chaos. It is a bit like letting loose a spell of chromatic hooliganism and then administering the same with another fierce round of chromatic governance; as the playful president of this painterly unrest she seems to derive her ultimate pleasure in policing the pigment to restore the law and order on the canvas.

Jitish Kallat
Sunday, November 2, 2008

”The artist is a receptacle for emotions that come from all over the place: from the sky, from the earth, from a scrap of paper, from a passing shape, from a spider's web.”
-Pablo Picasso.

The culmination of a gamut of emotions manifests themselves in works that Brinda explores in her new series entitled ‘Chroma Zone’.

Her basics firmly rooted from an education that originated in textile design in India and drawing & painting from Parsons school of design in New York, Brinda reconnoiters the myriad of spatial geometrics, in the realm of abstraction. Exploring materials and mediums, it has permitted her the freedom of expression as departure from her sojourn in the figurative articulation. The usage of multiple canvasses in the frame allows her to ‘bend the rules’ within her own metaphysical confines. The brighter palette, the splashes of colour acquiesce for a lyrical latitude.

In a confrontation with inner disquiet, where she strikes her balance of being a mother, wife, manager and artist, the paintings bring a resting space to this dissemination. Spontaneous, structured and yet flowing, this language of ‘pictorial words’ makes for serious viewing. Brinda has crossed another hurdle in her quest through an uncharted discovery of herself.

Jaideep Mehrotra

As a friend of the artist one has had the privilege to engage with Brinda's work through the years, and to watch it grow in its ability to exploit the Modernist tension between the material reality of painting and the imaginary space of the picture plane.

Abstraction in painting as a paradigm is a very broad umbrella sheltering a wide variety of approaches, which at times can be overwhelmingly distracting. But within the Indian subcontinent the proponents of abstract painting has generally veered towards lyrical abstraction which has its pedigree in the European Abstract school and Wassily Kandisnky's metaphysical aesthetic, rather than the American Abstract Expressionistic school driven by Clement Greenberg's 'essentialist' paradigm.

Brinda's paintings too articulate the very same lyrical impulse, but embeds within the abstract idiom references to local histories while adapting it to accommodate a personal obsession for relentless experimentation. Derived from landscapes encountered during travels brought forth through collisions of colour and form across a fluctuating grid, these paintings also reveal the artist's engagement with the materiality of textiles and the haptic quality of a variety of woven and printed fabric design patterns. Once such formal devices are pegged within the grid these are amplified and refined to a scale that invoke the monumental grandeur of geological formations with a few of them reminiscent of 'textile-mill-scapes', the now defunct engines that once powered the industrial and social landscape of erstwhile Bombay.

Away from such immediate associations and submerged within the warp and weft of radiant fields of color lie the most engaging feature of these works, which is the conscious program that aims at the extracting chromatic subtleties that are not apparent - aptly justifying the artist's decision to present these works under the legend 'Chroma Zone'. In a process akin to the transmutation of base materials into higher elements practiced by ancient alchemists, the artist attempts to nudge colour onto a zone that is resonant with the intimation of qualities that exceed our expectations. Consequently the artist offers us works on canvas and paper filled with colors that range from warm muddy greens to crushed emerald and scintillating spicy red expressed through textures and patterns in a vista of cascading incandescence expanding from the nocturnal foggy glow to the effervescent bonfire brilliance, and the involved application of paint and stencils, that is edgy as well as caressingly sensuous.

Baiju Parthan
Mumbai
October 2008