Abhijeet Gondkar

... the space between.

During the last one year, Kalpana has devoted herself to forging a new way of seeing through an intense and impassioned exploration of a variety of forms. Constantly questioning, seeking, taking nothing for granted, Kalpana has in her own way transformed our understanding of how we perceive the world and how art can alter our vision. Interweaving detailed account of personal experience and artistic endeavour, she developed a system of symbols with which she could depict her own experiences; her creativity fuses playfulness with a deeply felt philosophy.

In the current suite of works Kalpana’s influence of scientific theory is present in familiar grids and patterns upon which the images are built, and yet they possess a spontaneity and fluid movement in space that breaks away from any kind of rigid underpinning. Her attention is focused on the relationship of three-dimensionality in the perception of color and form of painting to the twodimensional area of the picture.

A key to understanding her paintings is to follow the process of how a picture is created – First, layers of colors with varying thickness are applied to the pictures surface on top and next to each other. In a complicated and sometimes lengthy process, portions of individual colors are rubbed away, washed off and altered using spatulas during the drying phase, so that on the one hand varnishes and on the other the torn edges of elusive paint are produced.
This creates an abstract colored surface that is renewed again and again and generates an infinite result, and is something that is worth viewing from close up. Then the layers of colors arranged in tiles behind each other, which convey the feeling of surprisingly variable depths, can be perceived particularly well. The artist notes that the transparency of the paints allows for one to witness - “all the events that went into the making of the painting”.

In the paintings, columnar forms suggested by built-up geometric patterns appear alongside mathematically derived shapes which the artist calls “city-scape” or “face”, the theoretical nature of these figures is significant, and is entwined with Kalpana’s interest in the generation of new pictorial spaces.
The painter shows herself primarily not in the structure of painting but in the idea of what is depicted. The painting is markedly illusionistic; lines are separated from the color and are the purely constructive element. And yet the lines and the space they circumscribe and depict correspond to the color. The reason for this is that, as already mentioned, with color the important thing is also the illusion of space. Her works are abstract conceptual figures culled from grid theory, a specialized area of topology involving the study of mathematical patterns—defined as closed curves in space whose lines do not touch or intersect. Kalpana continues to investigate the complexities of space that painting alone is able to conjure, drawing on the tension between organic and in-organic forms.

Her work, speaks not of forms but of forces and intensities, not of the stabilities of the grid but of dynamic movement – of some of the conceptual possibilities available to pictorial space when one pushes paint around and through and ultimately off the grid.

Mumbai, December 2009