Bina Sarkar Ellias

... conversation with the elements

Imagination can be elusive and seductive. If the mind is open to receiving its wealth of possibilities, it can transform an arid desert into a rain forest. Perhaps that is how Kalpana Shah has been making quiet harvest of her fertile mind.
It was on one still September evening this year, when I first witnessed the series of paintings that had, it seemed, appeared magically from her womb. Some twenty-five canvases of vivid pigments knife-bladed onto naked surfaces – like thumbprints that had unearthed articulation.
At that point, all the canvasses were untitled, urging the viewer to decipher readings of the artist’s journey. Clearly, one could trace a voyage of infinite pleasure in the elements of nature and play with pigment: the sun bleeding through a rust and amber sky or ochre mountains morphing into rugged faces; blue waves licking a thirsty shore or a shimmering river curving through forgotten terrain.
The application of metallic pigment in many of the works imbues another way of seeing, especially with the changing textures of light. Thus, what appears as a landscape when seen in the day, transforms with the slow dance of light into a blaze of abstract metaphors by night.
Similarly, her recent experiments with metal reflect a palpable delight in its malleability. Shah has not merely ‘tasted metal’ and is not merely enticed by its fluid nature, but to her the ductile strands are a poetic vocabulary that tantalizes the imagination. The installations, a series of metal rivers hinged to metal grips on either side flow into desired shapes as willed by the artist –– in a new rhythm discovered with an old form.

While living intensely with art as a gallerist, Shah, a self-taught dabbler of paint, shifted from her seminal, tentative experiments with Romanticism, to decisively discover the joys of a lexis close to ‘Abstract ExPress ionism’ – a form particular to a group of post-World War II painters like William De Kooning, Hans Hoffmann and Arshille Gorky, who were Americans of European origin. All of these erstwhile artists practiced abstract forms to exPress their inner thought-processes or feelings. Like Hoffmann, whose works mirrored his understanding of colour, its spatial juxtapositions and passion for natural elements, Shah also delves into her inner instincts that seek and connect with nature in its varied forms.
A Singaporean artist of the same genre, Mike Wong Joon Fong continues the process paved by Kooning, Hoffmann and Gorky in a slightly deviated form which may be defined as ‘action painting’. While he employs almost flamboyant brush strokes to explore the subliminal workings of his mind,
Shah’s process is meditative – a kind of recurring rhythm, like the repetitive reading of prayer beads. However, there is a sharing of philosophical inquiry between Mike Wong and Kalpana Shah, where they both believe being “human” means being spiritual.
The spiritual plays a key note in Shah’s symphony of abstracts, reflecting her own search as well as her proximity to veteran artist SH Raza and her admiration of his meditative vocabulary. In fact, Raza’s works have, for many years inhabited her being and inspired her own contemplation of life and its layers of meanings.

The practice of referencing other artists is never to diminish the work of the artist in question, but is in fact, an exciting exercise in transcending territories to discover people of a particular tribe, who, despite disparities in location and environment, share similar concerns. Interesting therefore, is the fact that while I allude to Hoffman, Gorky, Kooning, Wong and Raza, there is another artist,
Canadian painter Eli Bornowsky whose works are also stirred by a spiritual quest through the repetitive chant of lines or circles. Having intensely experienced both, the exhilaration of love and the bewildering pain of loss, Shah finds profound solace in the spiritual. And like Wong and Bornowsky, she has decidedly circumvented the fashionable trend of ‘issue’ or ‘cause’ related art to pursue her own conversations with the elements and mysteries of nature and the universe.

October 18, 2009
Jerusalem