ABOUT

Artist Statement   
  The images of my paintings represent collage or co-existence of different realities. They reflect multiple existences having multiple meanings which have been brought about by juxtaposition of ready made images or signs taken from popular culture. I am dealing with popular semiotics from the popular culture where the signs are potentially able to emanate infinite possibilities of signified(s). It has immense signification power, signs which are potential enough to emit a whole lot of possible signifiers. I am using a language which is very edgy, that is picking things up from a world which is replete with hundreds of meanings and I am reworking on them again in a way which also has many meanings.

   I look back at the artistic styles and canonical masterpieces of early artists such as the Pop artists and their ‘appropriation’ (or borrowing) of popular imagery from comic strips, advertisements and the mass media in general. My works show traits of post modernism which concentrates on the way images and symbols (‘signifiers’) shift or lose their meaning when put in different contexts (‘appropriated’) revealing (‘deconstructing’) the process by which meaning is constructed. Images have been combined from various sources, juxtaposing and overlapping cartoons, news photographs, technical drafting, famous paintings and movie stills.

   The images reveal non-narrative play of detached signifiers where the relationship between the two images is left unclear. Does one erase or cancel another? Do they comment one on each other? Do they replicate the effect of vision in the world today; where (as, for instance, on televisions that allow you to watch two channels at once) things may have no relationship to each other at all?

   In my work there is a denial of any frozen meaning. They have a tendency of not to resolve the problem between one interesting fragment and another fragment and lead them to a convincing whole, on the contrary I keep them side by side to emit better result. These paintings give us a feeling as if everything has been unassembled where you look at bits and pieces: a flash of colour here, a reference to graffiti or cartooning there, a passage of paint elsewhere. These paintings are made without “any preconception” and are composed directly on canvas without preparatory drawings, where there is use of reference, quotations and pastiche. These works abjure any claim to spontaneity and directness of expression, making use instead of pastiche and discontinuity.

   There is a rejection of modernism’s grand narratives of artistic direction, erasing the boundaries between high and low forms of art and disrupting genre’s conventions with collision, collage and fragmentation. Instead of grand narratives I have used local narratives in my painting. Meta narrative is a story about a story, encompassing and explaining other ‘little stories’ within totalizing schemas. In the grand narratives there is a tendency to dismiss the naturally existing chaos and disorder of the universe. So the grand theories or the grand, universal narratives are replaced with small, local narratives on specific local context as well as the diversity of human experience. They argue for the existence of a “multiplicity of theoretical standpoints” rather than grand all-encompassing theories.

   Signs themselves have multiple readings but my viewers are expecting a singular kind of reading. Is it possible? If it is possible, then there is a contradiction in this possibility. This is a very interesting contradiction, a very interesting aspect which I am dealing in my work. ‘Contradiction’ is a major subject in my art where I am addressing this ‘contradiction’. I am not starting from a multiple reading and leading it to a more singular, deliberate reading. Instead I am de-contextualizing the popular signs and working out an intended reading, a manufactured, a produced and a reworked meaning.

   I have also used ‘cliché’ and worked upon them in a definite context and endowed them with a meaningful existence. In my works I am isolating the signs and then returning them again to a second kind of crowd, without freezing them where the viewer gets involved in generating the meaning. There is no definite issue, no agenda in my work. I am choosing a restless, un-peaceful path full of tension. Choosing things from one kind of a restlessness and tension and placing or throwing them into another restless position.

   In these works where there is a fundamental play of signs, I am deliberately avoiding any kind of safe play with these signs. I am respectful to the ‘confusion’ amid which these signs actually exist in real life. This is a confusion these signs exist in. This is the kind of confusion in which these painting has resulted into, where ‘confusion’ is the quality of the painting. ‘Confusion’ is the situation in which we encounter or confront these signs in our daily life.

   Through these images it can be understood how we create meaning, we generate meaning, we connect signs and therefore multiplicity is very interesting because it generates interesting ideas, reflecting deeper truths of life. Post modern art considers all stances as unstable and insincere and therefore irony, parody and humor are the only positions that cannot be overturned by critique or revision.