Ranjit Hoskote.

... the lotus of the heart

In the decade that the Tao Art Gallery has been in existence, Kalpana Shah has extended her warmth and generosity of spirit to artists, writers, curators, collectors, and viewers at large. And while she is known as a friend of artists, few have suspected that her journey into art began, many years ago, with her own drawings and paintings. This aspect of her life had been kept intensely private until recently, when Kalpana realised that her love of the image helped her to exPress much that she could not otherwise articulate.
Kalpana had already decided to work towards a solo exhibition last year when tragic events
intervened to transform her life, completely altering its tempo and focus. While she worked to cope with the sweeping nature of the change, she found that the image brought a measure of consolation: while art cannot dismantle the irreparability of loss, it has brought a gradual measure of healing and acceptance.

Kalpana’s paintings develop from the single daub or cleat of paint, often in a burnished gold, copper or silver, as their unit of measurement. Arrayed in patterns that resemble the curve of coastlines, the path of cloud flotillas, the profiles of cities against the competing orbs of sun and moon, or forests touched by dawn, these daubs or cleats grow to encompass a world of sensory perceptions. They approximate for us the touch of sunlight, the feel of moonlight, the shadows of evening, the grey scale of darkling seas breaking into foam, forests rising to the snow line, or rivers in mid-current.
This abstraction is one informed by Kalpana’s long-term engagement with the idioms of such exponents of the visionary landscape as Akbar Padamsee, S H Raza and Ram Kumar: this suite of paintings acts, at one level, as an extended act of homage to their explorations.

At another level, Kalpana’s paintings are an embrace of the natural world, the world that speaks in unheard voices to the reason and the senses that are too often trapped in the anxieties and urgencies of metropolitan life.
In her suite of works shaped in mild steel and stainless steel, Kalpana addresses herself to a medium that is more customarily associated with industrial monumentality and endurance, and more recently with the cool, crisp elegance of design. She imparts to this medium the delicacy of the textile, the fluency of water. In Kalpana’s handling, steel is induced to renounce the blandness and sturdy angularities identified with its utilitarian avatar; in place of these hardy properties, we find undulating skeins of colour that enchant the eye with the music of pattern. We are reminded, when we view these works, of that marvellous trope of infinity playing in an eternal loop, dreamt up by mathematicians: the Möbius strip. We are put in mind, also, of those subtle threads of breath from which the fabric of the spirit is woven, in Kabir’s poetic account.

There is, in these paintings and works in metal, a suggestion of great expanses of space and emotion held in reserve. They remind us of the gift that the consciousness enjoys, for expanding to cosmic scale while also flowering in intimacy, or, in the words of the Chandogya Upanishad, they remind us that “as great as the infinite space beyond is the space within the lotus of the heart.”

Mumbai, December 2009