Sunday, December 31, 2006

Aditi Chitre



'Disco-nnet' 4x5.5 feet. oil on canvas


will be a bit of an exazaration to call this a body of works, but that is Aditi's practice for you. heavy concentrated imageries...often disturbing...exaust her too much to do a series in the traditinal sense. these set of three paintings are a persolnal release/reaction from sever bouts of illness and a resultant tryst with antibiotics and feeling "fucked" by 'scientific medication' :)

Aditi has always benn a fan of 'horror' as a genre...and though presently she seeks to move away from it...'horror' seems to have left a permanert imprint on her imagination...but one must note it is an engagement with horror...yet working outside the 'loudness' with which it is mostly associated. Combining horror with her flair to exploit colours in their pale freshness...aditi plays with 'viewing angels' to create three captivating paintings citiqueing certain theoritical 'key staones' of Science and medicine.

she has not read
Susane Sontages commentries on illness...but she pocesss the intellectual skill to generate an experiential critiqe...and (yet) the critique being able to project larger concers. of course the first thing that strikes you is the element of curious visuality. which is nice...it engages the mind...tantalizes it...invites it to enter the work. and then beyond a point the artiost's fromal concers take over...playing with reds greens pinks and their paleness...and their perpective planes. tried hard to coax her to contribute one large drawing.... just did not happen :(


'Disco-nnet' in the gallery space





1 O.D 3 times daily , 5.5x4 feet, Oil and Hair on Canvas



'Longetivity', 4x5.5 feet. oil on canvas



Detail of ' 1 O.D 3 times daily , 5.5x4 feet, Oil and Hair on Canvas





















Prepatory drawing for 'Longetivity'

























Prepatory drawing for Disco-nnet



Hate, love, love, love, hate, hate…seems like that might actually be able to define Aditi Chitre’s engagement with her art. The only stabilizing factor is that Aditi has not been indifferent. Having strong disagreements with the manner in which art is ‘consumed’ she has veered into animation and documentary filmmaking, also freelancing in graphic design. What keeps getting Aditi Chitre interested in painting is the sheer joy of mixing colours, applying paint on canvas, charcoal on paper…basically as simple as that.

What makes her art captivating is the ‘Van Goghian’ ability to bring out a ‘haunting’, often tormented essence in her forms. Right from her childhood, for Aditi, drawing and painting have always been mediums of expressing her experiential anguish(s). Often her art expresses her social hypersensitivity. At a time when most will look and move on, Aditi stops, notices and gets affected. What makes her so special is that her art is so ‘personal’ and yet it is so often ‘bursting with politics’.

Formally what one notices in her works is the obvious delight she gets in drawing and her ability to arrive at colours, which have a matt, pale freshness. Moreover Aditi has always resisted ‘training’. Hence even after spending four years in the department of painting, Faculty of Fine Arts, MSU Baroda, her language still remains ‘difficult to digest’ by certain institutionalized understanding of painting. It is tempting to think that the artist gets some conscious joy out of this ‘resistance’. Even while reacting to the most morbid of realities/experiences, Aditi’s paintings don’t lapse into a morbid catharsis. It is her incredible understanding of ‘the humorous’ that perforates her representation and layers it with an alternative aesthetics. It is through this introduction of humour that the artist unwittingly expresses her dissatisfaction with Van Gogh. This ‘introduction of humour’ as an artistic strategy has driven Aditi to experiment with the language of caricature. However it is a caricature that the artist had to play out in oil paint thereby facing a collision between medium and style. This struggle to represent caricature within an institutionalized understanding of painting is definitive of Aditi’s artistic struggle from her student days on. Her encounters with graphic design and animation have enabled her to loosen out her style. Yet more significantly they have expanded the artist’s understanding of the possibilities of artistic practice. Very clearly painting is a medium that Aditi will never be confined to but maybe never let go of.

Aditi Chitre is a Painter/ Animation Artist based in Mumbai, she also does freelance story boarding and enjoys foraying into graphic design to constantly push her own understanding of art.

1 comment:

Unknown said...

Hi Aditi,
Please contact me on
kanchi@taoartgallery.com

(whenever you check your blog)

your works are interesting....

Regards,
Kanchi Mehta
Curator,
Tao Art Gallery