My enquiries and observations around the multiple acts, performances, and operations of power in interpersonal relationships as well as the ideological mediations in everyday life at the levels of the personal, familial, and social begin with observations of silences. A large part of these observations have come about at the site of the familial (in its representations, forms of language, rhetorical strategies—with a tendency to normalize, stabilize, and depoliticize particular discourses and their effects.)
There are a lot of stray thoughts, references, citations, memories, that I try to assimilate into one single image. Since childhood, I have been sensitive towards the minute details of communication amongst people—voluntary and involuntary facial expressions, and rhetorical strategies—but what started off as perhaps an unhealthy, autistic over-investment in reading each gesture as a sign of something else; slowly turned into a deep interest in portraiture/face as a site of disavowal. I guess my over investment in the textures of flesh has some relation to my interest in disavowal; all of my works across mediums and concerns at some level try to grapple with the question of what it means to be complicit.
I feel that the medium of gouache/poster paint especially helps me in that pursuit—the scratchy quality, or the unease with which the paint sits on the paper as if it doesn’t belong there and can be washed off at any moment…The colors I use are pop and kitschy, but I have an obsessive impulse to mix them once they land on the paper and turn into dirtier looking colors. It is almost as if I want the viewer to be able to feel the ick that the plastery poster paint produces under my fingernails—it is more than mere discomfort or just a physiological compulsion to scratch an itch. I want estrangement not only to be understood as a concept but also to be felt as a part of our flesh.
In my paintings I translate the above-mentioned inquiries onto closeups of the face, which allows me to offer the world as an affective surface to be seen and read; as sites of dilemmas and encounters with the outside world. In that sense my paintings can be seen as caricatures, which try to uncover from within the notional regularities of the face, traces of impending biases and certain disavowed truths.
My caricature—paintings are an amalgamation of images of portraits collected from a variety of sources—news headlines about authoritarian despots and leaders, candid photographs and selfies of friends and family, and faces that circulate in the form of viral memes, to name a few. The faces tend to betray complicity, and an intimate awareness of how their being is embedded in violence. The face as a site performs our truths before we can take cognizance of it, and I am interested in the silent theater of it all.
The largely masculine portraits that I paint try to capture how the complicity between cultural and economic value systems is acted out in almost every decision we make; and the multiple layers of references to different (masculine) figures from family members, friends, to people in power; allows me to reconfigure the question of governmentality with an emphasis on the different modes in which power is exercised; especially in interpersonal relationships in the midst of the absence of speech and sound.
The paintings were installed as an experiment in a Psychotherapy Clinic in my University, adding another layer to the clinical silence that pervades such spaces.
Image List:
1. “Blood”
2. “Sweat”
3. “Tears”
4. “Trickle Down Economy”
5.”To Do List”
6. “Can I Speak to the Manager?”
