Akbar Padamsee.

Tao has many galleries at different levels. Walking through one of the galleries on the upper floor I came across a remarkable painting structured with small strokes of the knife. I was curious, I asked Kalpana, whose work it was and she said it was a work of a new artist. After few months when I visited her again she showed me few more works of the same artist and I said to her you must have an exhibition of these works. Who is the artist? She smiled and replied these are my works. I was pleasantly surprised.Earlier I had seen her drawings which were realistic and now this transformation.

She queried do they resemble any other artist or do you see anybody’s influence? I answered, No, they don’t. They could be broadly classified as optical art or OpArt which hits the retina directly. There is much depth in the works unlike the use of classical perspective where the vanishing point is the ultimate destination. In this works the depth is non-perspectible and the structure is architectonic or multi dimensional. The eye enters the body of work, travels around back and forth creating a new kind of multi-dimensional space and optical illusion. Kalpana told me excitedly that she and her husband Pankaj are planning a show of her works in the near future. But tragedy struck leaving Kalpana alone.
To be an artist or a scientist the first condition is to know inner-self which means “TO BE” art belongs to a different time and space where birth and death are part of the continuum.

Mumbai, December 2009