The real, the palpable
and the unseen in Kavita Jaiswal’s
Compositions

Mariam Karim

There is a seeking and evocative quality in Kavita’s compositions which is an essential component of the mind of the contemporary abstract artist. It comes forward more in her work, deliberately involving the viewer in the process of artistic generation rather than presenting a finished opaque oeuvre. The palpable, the real, the substance, the seeable, and the unseen all become players in a poetic unfolding of line and colour, just as in Sachidananda Vatsyayana Agyeya’s poetry the pratyaksh and the paroksh all inform and evoke equally. Each material has its own possibilities and Kavita’s exploration and inclusion of this aspect of art has evolved over time in her work to the point of acknowledging the material itself as a stakeholder in artistic production. What is the relationship of the reflections on water and the Monet-esque floats are perhaps the tenderest of her works and the most experimental as they combine a more familiar aesthetic sense with a modernistic rhythm and are reminiscent of Theodor Adorno’s challenging of conventional surface coherence (modernist philosopher and composer of the 1940s).

The idea of a more intimate and hidden world existing under reflections on water, a resurgent esoteric world that becomes periodically visible with a break in surface, just as the canvas “bleeds” in the paintings, and the line escapes from the rupture. All these may also be taken as an interior monologue of the artist, and yet again, daring modernism with a metaphysical interpretation of line and form, of colour and texture, turning towards an omniscient creator whose creation neither begins nor ends and works of art being mere glimpses or flashes of an endless journeying.