The Seventh Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art

For the last decade, New Delhi-based artist Sheila Makhijani has pursued a singular direction in her work. Eschewing fashionable mainstream trends such as figuration, digital photography and installation, she has immersed herself in a sense of process and discovery where the materials and tools of painting and drawing, in large measure, determine the outcome of her paintings, extending abstraction into a kind of psychic mapping. The space that Makhijani’s work occupies is one that can only arise during the process of making. It is not preconceived, nor is it entirely haptic. Its domain is one that is fugitive, provisional and constantly in a state of becoming. For Makhijani, the physical dimensions of this arena may be expansive — a large canvas or a broad wall. Perhaps, equally, they may be discreet and humble — a small gouache or tiny watercolour, or a precarious, skeletal construction of wire and interwoven shadows. Drawing and mark-making are fundamental to Makhijani’s work and appear to operate in a suspended state: as lines, layers of pigment and scored incisions on the surface never seem to arrive at a final destination. The surfaces of Makhijani’s paintings remain fluid, dynamic and devoid of referents. The urban context in which Sheila Makhijani has lived and worked for most of her life has been cited as a possible catalyst for the networks and densely constructed linear fields of her work. Curator and critic Roobina Karode has noted: Since her childhood, Sheila has experienced the city by walking long stretches or then hopping on buses from one stop to another. Her partaking in the direct experience of mobility and congestion in the city, its random and regular paths and patterns, its assembly of glass and concrete facades and visible formal disparities, are deeply embedded in her consciousness. 1 Makhijani’s visual language is never descriptive, however, and while her directional mark-making and brush marks may recall aerial maps, tracks and diagrams — the webs of lines, layered colours and nuanced tones construct their own reality, independent of representation. The process of painting here, if not engaged with representation, is most often about retrieval and capture. It is about harnessing the sensations which percolate to the surface of consciousness and manipulating the artist’s materials of choice — a particular graphic repertoire of overlays, scoring and linear drawing mark the painted surface. This essentially intuitive process requires a sense of balance, restraint, control, and an innate understanding of painting’s materiality. The works selected for APT7 are representative of two major strands in Makhijani’s practice. A series of small, gouache drawings on paper crystallise her fusion of a graphic language with illusionism and three-dimensionality, while larger paintings, including the diptych Unintentionally intended 2011–12 exemplify her intuitive and exploratory methods. The two halves of the diptych provide dramatic points of contrast as the left panel appears to descend into a dark cavern of tangled rail tracks and building infrastructure, while the panel on the right suggests an ascending, dizzying view upwards into light and air. The series of ten gouaches highlight a particular sensibility that has characterised Makhijani’s work for the past five years. She has previously used stitched lines as elements in collusion with drawn and painted marks on folded paper. The current series further confounds hierarchies of media and graphic signs through the compression of apparent three-dimensionality. Quasi-diagrammatic drawing combines — sometimes in harmony, at other times in discord — with shadows and planes that recall the imagery of European Constructivism. In contrast, Makhijani’s paintings are full of swirling paths and illusionistic depths, defying navigation. These vistas could be cosmological or, equally, microscopic, cellular or atomic. As Karode has stated, Makhijani’s: Decisions are processed while working with each brushstroke prompting and engaging with the other in a specific way. Line and colour take on a self-acting gesture, moving as if to arrive at unpredictable destinations by making unseen connections. 2 This formalist dimension of painting has endured now for over a century, and Sheila Makhijani’s work is testimony to its ongoing resilience. For her, the making and construction of the painted surface is based primarily on the language of form, colour, line, shape and balance — within a visual field that goes beyond representation. In a review of a 2007 solo exhibition at New Delhi’s Anant Art Gallery, Meera Menezes referred to Makhijani’s painting as: . . . a melange of line and colour. The inanimate rather than the animate seemed to have stoked her imagination. She had transposed her experiences into a tangled web of lines which mimicked DNA helices or the rungs of a ladder. The artist seemed more concerned about trapping 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. 3 David Burnett 1 Roobina Karode, ‘Is it: Sheila Makhijani’, On Track: Sheila Makhijani’s Recent Works [exhibition catalogue], Anant Art Gallery, New Delhi, 2007, p.49. 2 Karode, p.53. 3 Meera Menezes, ‘Restless tangles’ [review], Arts News Magazine of India , vol.12, no.4, 2007, p.132. SHEILA MAKHIJANI Still painting 156