Somnath Bhatt | Bichitr
21 November - 16 January
Somnath Bhatt, Parting phase, Gouache, acetone transfer on paper, 24 × 20 in
Somnath Bhatt’s work seems to point in many directions at once, suggesting a curious mind ona hunt for the hidden grammar of things, constructing meaning through piecing togetherfragments. And yet for Bhatt, this sense of meaning is inherently elusive; the fragments – mixed media drawings, assemblages of burned wood, and a complex underlying strata of symbol and reference – resist definitive interpretation, frustrating our desire for certainty.
The title of the show, which is named after a seventeenth century Mughal painter, may be a corruption of the Sanskrit word vīcitra (विवित्र) meaning ‘odd, many-coloured, manifold, strange, curious, unique’. These qualities are reflected throughout the exhibition: repeated forms with unexpected variations, suggesting lifeforms reproducing themselves with subtle or surprising mutations. ‘Rakh Na Ramakda’ (Gujarati for ‘toys made of ash’) is a series of small wooden sculptures that resemble both ritual objects and children's toys – playful yet mysterious, reminiscent of those ever-frustrating puzzles made up of interlocking wooden shapes. Somepieces have added decorations, both natural forms (shells, feathers, leaves) and human-made (artificial pearls, paper flowers, glass beads). These imitative additions disrupt our sense of time, with materials and processes such as plastic and metal casting introducing an anachronistic sense that these objects could be ancient and yet, on closer inspection, must have been created recently.
A similar sense of time overlapping on itself occurs in the drawings, produced with the use of acetone to transfer laser toner prints to handmade paper, and completed with the application of gouache (recalling the miniature painter of the exhibition’s title). This melding of modern and older media introduces the maker’s hand into the impersonal printing process, along with a kind of loss that makes new – a transformation, as in the burned wooden sculptures. Fire is destructive; however, what is left behind has a new impact and meaning, evoking its use in religious rites and ceremonies. This sense of transformation can also be found in the content of the drawings themselves: ‘Otra Chitra’ is a series of works featuring secretive figures making a “shushing” gesture, the pixelated repetitive forms referencing an internet vernacular. The title comes from a Gujarati term for weather that can’t decide – neither summer nor autumn, with grey skies and sudden shifts of temperature. We are left to wonder whether these are many similar figures each in different costume, or the same person endlessly searching for an outfit that presents who they are to the world. A contemporary loss of the self among its own reflections and performances perhaps, but it also suggests the same uncertainty that underlies a question key to many mystical traditions: asking oneself, to the point of disintegration, ‘who am I?’
Such contemplative practices share a difficulty with, or suspicion of, language with these works. The gesturing figures perhaps refusing or asking us not to speak; the minuscule handwriting hidden in the background of drawings – filling in gaps in the grid, a hum of possible meaning that we are not privy to. Language can be considered holy, as in the case of Sanskrit, but ultimately any experience – and especially those classed as mystical, as well as the traumatic –is not something that can be fully described in words. And yet it is impossible not to try, to attempt the translation project between inner and outer worlds. Bhatt's work does not grant us a solution, rather another pixel added to the pile, another bit/byte of evidence.
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