Emptiness of existence

Paramjot Walia

A solemn empty chair in a collage of 24 paintings where the color gradient could either depict the 24 hours of a day or the bright colors could be a metaphor of happy times, refuses to budge from its position as night makes its way through the day ritualizing wait and longingness..wait..wait for a better tomorrow Art Konsult’s “Pursuit of Silence” by Gopa Trivedi, a MS University, Baroda alumni, uses the traditional Sanghaneri paper and gouche, natural pigments, khadiya and Arabic gum as her preferred mediums to capture the unfathomable desire of the void existence. Surfacing a unique sensitivity to her surroundings, Gopa’s works act as an excellent anology to everyday realities publicizing not only her skill but also socializing her experience. Her work signifies reflection and traces of her own life as she explores the fragility and resilience of life, the permeability and vulnerability of a broken self and the unquenched search for the complete being. My favorite, an interesting piece titled “Friction”, represents the scratches and the wounds left after a chair is being sat upon stamping the presence of someone forever. The allegorical treatment of everyday household objects accentuates the connection with the viewer, retaining the generality of the subject matter while rendering a new life to it. Trivedi’s work, for instance, “Family Sofa” is a cohesive narrative of complexities of middle class households using sofa more than a commodity, ridiculing the social pressure of making it a necessity even if its unused or unwanted while the division in the painting outrightly announces the emotional divide in the family. Elucidating her gripping works, Gopa says “My works deal with the portrayal of materiality of an ordinary middle class life. They are my attempts to fabricate the nuances of longing which focus on the past but do not seek the past, and the patterns and the objects oscillate between longing and belonging. The works, majorly non-figurative, reflect the embodied response-able objects from a middle class household. The objects in my works become personifications of relationships. Exploring traces of life embedded in this material legacy of a middle class household, the works are efforts of putting myself in a relationship with objects in my living spaces. The deliberate fragmentations in the narratives and arrangement of empty spaces, are attempts to trigger the aesthetics of silence of its own kind. Like punctuated by silence the words weigh more in these works, the translucent forms, emptiness and the undefined are attempts to convey the dichotomy of presence and absence. To express it further, my works contour the domestic spaces revealing absence within the seeming wholeness of their being.” Gopa’s composition suggests a timeless silence and a contemplative aesthetic space characterized by a suspended calmness with the monochrome canvas reflecting a deeper, complex metaphysical concern as intricate emotions act as ‘protagonists’.