A celebrated female artist from India showcases her work in France

Artist Anju Dodiya’s new images at Paris based Galerie Daniel Templon have a humorous or cartoonish tinge. Here we see her fighting with a canvas, ostensibly to make it work. ‘Face-off’ (after Kuniyoshi) is a series in watercolor and charcoal on paper.

While portraying herself, Anju Dodiya depicts issues like vulnerability, eroticism, violence, self-exploration, dreams and extreme situations in general. These new works do not really mark a radical departure from previous work, besides the humor and irony already highlighted. They suggest something that traverses the personal.

A painted portrait in Paper Storm has a plug in her mouth as if it could not speak or communicate –an image taken from an untitled photograph by Maurizio Cattelan from 2000. In ‘Face-off’, continuing her own drawings of the series ‘Walled City’ (2008) - the image in the painted canvas within the painting, has something like shackles or a noose around her neck as if captive to its possible failure as art.

In ‘Quarrel Duet’ we see an image, hidden or tormented by a red mask while fighting back, from the canvas, with some kind of cloth in each of her hands. In ‘Eclipse’, the painter is energetically fighting to erase the blackness covering most of the painting she is working on. In ‘Entangled’, several cords emanate from the head of the samurai/artist as if she is about to be strangled and consequently defeated by her own mistaken actions or decisions.

In ‘Surge’, it seems that one of the painted images is getting out of the canvas- becoming real, taking the form of a bizarre spotted octopus, with tentacles resembling claws or thorns, and two large and comical eyes. This monster may defeat the artist who is only fighting with a brush. Sometimes we see two figures at work – or at war! They do stand for the inner demons of the artist battling it out to overcome one another. The artist reveals they refer to duplications of the self. The new images seem also to explode, flashing from blackness, being partially surrounded by black areas on the edges – ‘charcoal clouds’, in the artist’s words, suggesting that the act of creation is one extreme situation. The black surroundings also help to provide a certain dream-like quality.