new canvases

New Canvases — that’s the simple title, shorn of thematic references. But the new canvases of Sheetal Gattani, presented by Chemould Prescott Road, Mumbai, at its recent show — both in the gallery and online — overturned the very idea of ‘new’ being virgin, untarnished territory. The discoloured, damaged, degraded epidermis of her canvases, astir with intimations from underneath, implied the persistence of a past that subverts brash pretensions to newness. Because every ‘now’ comes with its embedded debris of ‘then’. And it’s the texture, speckled with clues of weathering, that imports a meditative gravity into her work.

The structuring of the canvases is artfully and thoughtfully done, as Pooja Savansukha’s introductory note explains. The artist builds her work on the black acrylic ground of an unstretched canvas over which paint of different colours is slathered, not by a brush but by pieces of handmade paper, a painstaking ritual of layering that harnesses deviations, accidents, re-starts. Mounted on stretchers once the paint dries, the canvas weave colludes with the process to claw the surface. As the underlying paint struggles through the top layer, at times soiled with black, what emerges is a striated, abraded topography.

For more information and images visit: https://www.gallerychemould.com/exhibitions/106-new-canvases-sheetal-gattani/