The teasing title, Is It, of Sheila Makhijani's solo show, enticed the viewer to embark on an exploratory journey - to try and decipher her set of complex works. The artist preferred a series of big canvases, which formed a perfect foil for her miniature sculptural works, in a show at New Delhi's Anant Art Gallery, from the 18th of November to the 14th of December.
While her paintings and sculptures offered no recognizable forms or objects, they struck the viewer with their sheer exuberance and restless energy. Her densely worked spaces offered the eye no respite, no place to rest and linger. Instead, the viewer was carried off at a giddying pace, driven by some unseen motor, to traverse the labyrinth of lines, created through a process of addition and erasure. Perhaps they grew out of her urban sensibility and reflected the changes she had observed - the scaffoldings at construction sites that herald the mushrooming of buildings or the demolitions that pave the way for a new metro line. Perhaps, they recalled the long journeys by train she undertook while travelling in different countries, earnestly watching railway tracks as they whizzed past.
Makhijani perceived the world around her as a melange of line and colour. The inanimate rather than the animate seemed to have stoked her imagination. She had transposed her experiences in a tangled web of lines which mimicked DNA helices or the rungs of a ladder. The artist seemed more concerned about rapping nuggets of memory within the interstices of her grids - her works thus seemed like a continuum of moments, her lines serving as devices of memory capture.
The surfaces of Makhijani's paintings carried an intuitively built up accretion of layers. At times, she had used wet on wet technique and had proceeded to scratch out paint with the back of her brush to produce her trademark striations and dense grids. Sometimes, her lines meandered languorously without any particular intention of arriving anywhere, and at other times, they seemed taut and acquiver with purpose. One could see a subtle shift in her works both in terms of the palette that she used and her brushstrokes. Primary colours made way for pastel shades like lemon, mauve, and peach, and the broad sweep of the brush in works like Peppermint! provided an almost calming touch to the breathlessness of her lines.
Her whimsical titles like What were you thinking?, What's up?, Tak, Tak, Tak, Stutter, Stutter, indicated a measure of playfulness that accompanied her oils - a sort of "Don't take all this too seriously" attitude. The playfulness could also be seen in her tiny wire sculptures, reflecting her enjoyment in the tactile processes that the medium afforded her.
Makhijani's sculptural works could well be perceived as three-dimensional drawings. She fashioned them out of watch dials, wire, and transparent glass beads, to produce forms where the emphasis was on linearity. At times, the sculptures mimicked strange insects, and at others, stick figures on a playing field. Part of the enjoyment of the work was generated by an interesting interplay between shadows and objects - a sort of pas de deux between the ephemeral and the material.
However, the display of these miniature works did deserve to be re-thought. While they worked well when they were displayed in intimate spaces, they were in danger of losing their impact in the larger gallery area. Here, they were placed on structures, which seemed to mirror the material transformations of Makhijani's painted forms. The interaction between these and her sculptural works tended to be problematic and needed to be resolved further.
For the past few decades, Makhijani has been going about her work with quiet determination, eschewing other art practices with more 'fashionable.' This integrity shone through in her latest works and the viewer left the gallery charged with the joyous energy that the amalgam of the line and color had generated.
-Meera Menezes