Mehlli Gobhai’s new solo show in Mumbai

The practice of artist Mehlli Gobhai addresses a specific formal problem: the split between surface and structure that is a defining characteristic of much modern painting. At another level, it records the dialogue of spare line and burnished field: often, a gradual luminosity emerges from beneath the sombre colors that he layers, one above the other, in strata of roughened and smoothed textures, so that the painting aspires to the condition of leather or parchment sanctified by years of ritual.

For him, the act of painting in series goes beyond mere repetition, and assumes the aspects of intensification, affirmation and renewal. The method connotes a system of correspondences and mutations that unifies an artist's work in time. The artist’s new works are on view at Chemould Prescott Road, Mumbai. An accompanying essay by art critic Ranjit Hoskote notes:

“Austerely refined as they are, in the taut linearity of their structure and the deep-welling penumbral richness of their colour, Mehlli Gobhai’s paintings have often been thought to be restful. Whether suggestive of cool metal, burnished leather, weathered stone or the edge of luminosity signing a margin of reassurance against the dark, these abstractions have been viewed as meditative pauses: they seem to offer their viewers a temporary reprieve from the frenzied music of life.

However, look more closely, and a different reality manifests itself. While many artists tend to organize their paintings as a pattern of intensity and slack, emptiness and fullness, producing a loose-woven rhythm, the artist develops his pictorial space as a field of competing intensities.”

His is an art of deep coloristic and textural saturation held in counterpoint by geometric precision. The colors and textures may bear subliminal associations, but the sharp linearity and deliberate saturation remind us that the artist registers the primacy of the human imprint of order over the contingencies of nature and chance. These paintings function as energy diagrams, holding a set of forces together through linear symmetries, subtle allusions to the genres vestigially latent within his abstractionist idiom.

(Information courtesy: Chemould Prescott Road)