Nothingness of Something

Review

The world around us is generally discernible by the placation of two opposite pylons, which could be similar or opposite in nature but are prevalent in every core of human life. Flipping the crucial coin of nature versus progress, artist Priyanka Govil presents a subtle polemic through her art work, reviews Nisha Aggarwal.

Like a pendulum of a clock that repeats its path between two limits, art too has ranked between figuration and abstraction as a linguistic and stylistic discourse, with semi-abstraction being agreeable to both. To decipher the difference between the three and to discern the gradual progressions from one to the other is as abstruse as trying to separate one grain of sand.

A sense of analogical disparity prompted my visit to the solo show of artist Priyanka Govil's selected works at Art Bull, New Delhi presented by Gallery Art Konsult from 11th-30th September, 2013. Delhi-based Priyanka has obtained her BVA and MVA in Painting from Faculty of Fine Arts, Maharaja Sayajirao University, Vadodara. She is the recipient of Inlaks India Award 2010 and has had many solo, curated, as well group shows in India to her credit.

Priyanka's work could be seen as landscapes, including rivers, roads, mountains etc. that one finds in nature or in the man-made world around. In a few other works, the subtle subjective images kept in created spacious backgrounds reveal the sublimity of natural scenes. But interestingly, her works are mental projections of the images, objects, architectures and natural scenes that she has collected in memory, which emerge as landscapes. She replaces the natural elements with mundane household objects in some places by merely suggesting their presence. She rarely uses human figures, ironically, this stark absence hints at the very presence of the human.

By using a borderline abstraction in her figuration, and replacing natural with the manmade, Priyanka shows her concern for an environment with fast depleting natural resources and the rapidly changing landscape of today. The ghost like presence of humankind speaks of human interventions which has caused these changes not just in natural landscapes, but cultural landscapes as well. Priyanka's work depicts the two faces of the coin of progress versus a fast-vanishing environment.

In this collection, Priyanka has adopted a simply layered, textured surface using dry mediums like charcoal and crayons, encouraging a visual touching of the surface by the viewer. The effect is that of a woven fabric which is highly textured. Priyanka's palette toggles between neutral browns, ochres, grays and black, interspersed with a use of a sharp red which denotes a kind of danger in an otherwise mundane mental landscape.

Untitled, Archival & Photo Ink on Paper
with LED lights on back,
4.5"x5.5"(each), 30 pieces, 2012-13

Priyanka's art works display a symbiosis of tactility yet intangibility, abstraction yet figuration, absence yet presence and deliberation yet spontaneity. They are landscapes, but at the same time they are not landscapes, they are made of minute strokes, but offer a wider image of the artist's imagination. They present the belongingness to various opposite aspects which transcends from its something to its nothingness. A visit to Priyanka's show takes the viewer to the wake of an estuarine coexistence of both,'the this as well as the that' in perfect harmony.

Originally Published in Art&Deal Magazine, Issue 65/Vol.9, No.34/November 2013