'Remembred Abstraction'

Hacineda Gallery, Mumbai.

Painting on the Wall

- Ravikumar Kashi

Each wall has a layered history. These kind of layered walls with textured surfaces, dripping paint, colorful graffiti or decaying wood/rusting metal surfaces fascinate me due to their intangible history and visual quality. Since 2006 I have been photographing such walls /surfaces wherever I found: be it in my neighbourhood or places where I travelled such as Delhi, Chennai, Hyderabad, Ooty, Mysore, Magadi, Jaipur and Kokkare Bellur. I found such examples even outside the country in cities like London, Brighton, Los Angeles, New York, Palo Alto, Miami, Shanghai, Jordan, and in various parts of Mexico and Korea. While shooting these photographs I isolate certain parts of the wall to form a different kind of visual experience. In this process of isolation the original image gets transformed and gains a new identity. As a result, in the final image, they start ‘looking’ like abstract images in their own right.

Each photograph has two layers, or rather is a merging of two sets of experiences. The first is the immediate response and a particular moment of looking at the surface and its constituents. The second is the recollection from my collective memory of abstract works that I have accumulated or some of the principles of abstraction internalized by me while doing abstract paintings for several years. Hence I have called this project ‘Remembered Abstraction’ as a way of denoting the play of memory that is captured in these images. Arguably, such images and the experiences are wedged between real and abstract, and hence hold an ambivalent position. For me, this is a very fascinating position.