‘Let There be a Heaven of Blackred Roses’ by Aditi Singh

Mumbai based Chemould Prescott Road presents a solo show of Aditi Singh’s recent works. The series entitled ‘Let There be a Heaven of Blackred Roses’ brings to the fore her concerns as an artist.

A recurring theme in her work is the anatomy of flowers as part of her cognitive landscapes. According to the artist, a form chooses you a certain moment and it then won’t leave you in peace. She has been drawing flowers for more than a decade and they still continue to intrigue her. They are not commonplace and can only probably survive in extreme climates. These flowers are not for decorative purpose. And as she believes, perhaps that’s what initially attracted her to them, the ephemeral yet tenacious aspect of their enduring existence.

There’s a shift in scale in the current body of her work. Space is dense, form un-attenuated, and mark making is infinite, dark and textural. According to the artist, the scale does shift from the intimate to the immense. But the largeness of an image is not decided only by the size of the paper. She explains in an interview with Anita Sharma: “I do enjoy playing with dualities/ contradictions. I want viewers to move up close, just to step back, and to have an encounter with the work. In fact, every movement of the body calls for a different mode of viewing.”

As she reveals, the language that one strives to create is merely the beginning of the intriguing discovery process. In drawing them, the artist is only attempting to measure the gap that exists between herself and the form, awaiting the metamorphosis of ‘the One into the Other’. Ultimately, what she is searching for is a space in which the real and imagined, darkness and light, permanent and ephemeral will no more be perceived as contradictions.

However, she finds it tough to pin down those moments when one actually begins to ‘create’; it’s rather a constant process involving evolution/dissolution. She doesn’t stop making an image once she leaves the studio. In fact, the mind is constantly thinking and imagining, taking things apart, and rearranging. Aditi Singh states to sum up her creative processes.