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A major concern — or should one say campaign?— of contemporary art has been to curtail the traditional dominance of such material and media as paint and brush, stone and chisel. This has, of course, been a part of its challenge to, and the subversion of, the age-old assumptions of ‘high art’ in the cause of redefining the very roots of its identity. Not surprising, therefore, that the young generation, infected by the liberating wave that has swept the West in the past few decades, not only in art practice but also in creative thought, would go by the changing parameters.
As Anita Gopal does (Fragile Order, till May 30, Ganges Art Gallery) . Trained and living in London, this young artist quite clearly seeks alternative expressions in her art. To begin with, she works with paper of all kinds: glossy, thin, thick, stiff, newsprint and so on. And paper, despite its elevation to creative legitimacy through the collages and assemblages of famous artists, does not yet command in India the respectability— or the commerce — of painting. But Gopal does it anyway, and with a kind of dégagé commitment.
Besides, confounding those who prefer labels, her work resists categories. Would you call it collage? Or assemblage? But it does not neatly fall under either. Her name for her style is fractism, from fractal, for she discovers in the chaos of life an essential order of echoing forms. Gopal treats her material as plastic, and sculpts it into different shapes that are then arranged to construct, what the artist calls, cut-paper relief because these 3D pieces are framed for the wall.
But there are also the objets trouvés put together with discards, which could be called sculptural arrangements or perhaps even small installations. Quaintly amusing, insidious in their reference to consumerism, the pieces reinvent trash as treasure, complete in their environment of robust disarray: strewn magazines, torn pages, tapes, rope, and a chair laden with the artist’s things.
It is the balletic elegance of the reliefs, unmistakably feminine without being pretty, that is striking in its visual appeal. The paper— cut, folded, layered, with thin, agile strips looping, leaping, pirouetting, like spontaneously sketched lines or hanging like danglers — composes these riveting arabesques, with subtle, beguiling variations, and often teamed with tape and twine, thread and rope.
A set of framed reliefs, simply called Untitled, takes understatement to a few, spare, playful calligraphic touches. In her work, Gopal incorporates the printed images on the paper — particularly of jewellery — into her fluent schemes, but her idiom is not figurative, although recognizable forms are fleetingly hinted at. Especially noted here is the fluid, elusive interface between paper and space. Space treated not just as a flat terrain, but as an inviting stage on which intricate patterns dance around to evoke an impossible lightness of being.