Spaces dynamised by gestures

Sunil Gawde is a gestural abstractionist, whose paintings develop from precisely calibrated arcs and the bold strokes of roller and scraper-blade. RANJIT HOSKOTE on the artist's new suite of work on display at Mumbai's Sakshi Gallery.

SUNIL GAWDE's recent paintings mark a breakthrough in the career of this accomplished painter, who has chosen to remain committed to abstractionism even at a time when this idiom is thought to have exhausted its possibilities. Indeed, Gawde sets out to demonstrate that abstractionism is capable of further refinements, further revelations. In this new suite of paintings, on show at the Sakshi Gallery, Mumbai, Gawde revisits all the phases of painterly activity through which he has passed since his first solo exhibition in 1990: the act of revisiting is also an act of refashioning. We observe a convergence, in these new images, of his various preoccupations with prismatic effects; with implied geologies and cosmologies; with the physicality, even the athletics of the act of painting.

Gawde is a gestural abstractionist: over the last decade, he has employed pigment as relief, playing with layers of banked and built-up oil paint. His paintings develop from precisely calibrated arcs, bold strokes of roller and scraper-blade: the edge, always his primary device, assumes a special importance in the paintings gathered together to form this exhibition. Gawde's art has so far been characterised by a lavish handling of the painter's resources: he has revelled in the virtuoso exercise of technique, been intoxicated with the luminosity of colour, in love with the sumptuousness of texture. All these impulses are now held in masterful check, subordinated to the imperative of an austere and clean-edged image.

Restraint is the key to the new work. Gawde now scales down the play of momentum and balance, chaos and order; he renounces his love of flourish, his tendency to cut dramatic swathes through the density of pigment applied in impasto embankments. He also abdicates the Magrittean wit that he essayed in his previous exhibition of paintings and objects, "Oblique" (1998), when he briefly but elegantly courted Conceptualism.

The paintings in this new suite are all on the square format. The colour is pared down to the near-monochromatic; the forms are sharply defined, the gestures of roller and scraper-blade that make them are brisk and economical. Only the subdued play of gloss and matte - with the gleam of trowelled pigment set against the areas of webbed and braided texture left behind by the roller's passage - remains to suggest the palpable sensuousness of his earlier work. Gawde's is a classic programme of minimisation: through an economy of means, he achieves a plenitude of effects.

Forthright and overt as they seem, Gawde's forms are in fact elliptical and allusive. But their allusiveness no longer relies, as it used to do, on emotional associations operating through the memory of colour or the half-glimpsed phantoms of material objects. Any mnemonic devices that may be found in his new paintings carry archetypal connotations of act and phenomenon. Some of these paintings evolve from the impulse to cut or part a membrane: the cleft or cut becomes a vital image, suggestive of the parted labia, the mouth of the universe opening to consume all and give birth to all. We may speculate whether this is the Tantric "eye of love": for, if it is, Gawde performs a spare, highly sophisticated reprise of the neo-Tantric heritage of Indian abstractionism. In this reprise, the florid ornamentalism of neo-Tantra is stripped entirely away, and only the primal image is placed on view.

At the risk of proposing a basis in visual reality for some of Gawde's images, it must be recorded that some of his paintings appear to refer to astronomical phenomena: the sweeping edge-wise arc of a planetary sunrise, the rim of the sun's corona showing through an eclipse, a pear-shaped moon; the streaming orbit of a meteor, blades of light intersecting in the night sky. Such meditations are interrupted forcefully by paintings like the one in which Gawde bisects the pear shape that he deploys often in this suite: the pear is sliced in half, but the halves have slipped out of alignment.

With such a move, Gawde precludes all associative moves, and reinforces the idea of the image-as-diagram. Should such a phrase resonate with the connotations of yoga, it is not without reason: Gawde speaks of the intense concentration and the control over the breath that he must exercise in the act of painting - breath, hand, implement and material join in a fluid continuum in this gestural pranayama - in order to obtain his precise and seemingly effortless effects.

What is it that lies buried within an abstract painting? It may be argued that all abstraction buries the visible and "representative" within itself, while also articulating it obliquely. In this new suite of paintings, Gawde addresses the limits of abstraction in the dramatic gestural register that he has practised. These works embody an attempt to extend the space and scope of abstractionist painting, by subordinating its surface densities of colour and pigment to the energy of the pure gesture. Where, formerly, the gesture was one more element in his orchestra of effects, Gawde now isolates it as a form-giving, dynamising principle.

This emphasis on the dynamising gesture can take subtle forms. In certain of the new paintings, Gawde deploys an Op Art-like strategy, not merely to achieve a retinal optical sleight of hand, but discreetly to break down our assumptions about the stability of the visible world. Gawde uses the archetypal form of the circle crossed in a square to build a sequence of near- identical images: the crosses are made of barely visible thread, and the exercise of differential focus makes the string crosses appear and vanish under scrutiny. Similarly, the textural play of gloss and matte surfaces, muted in these new works, is no longer an end but a means. Gawde uses it to transform many of his painted surfaces into low-relief sculptures with light and shadow.

When we change our angle of approach to a near-white painting, for instance, we find revealed the archetypal diagram that Gawde has incised into its surface: the contrasting emphasis of flat and ridged areas alters with alterations in light. Gawde's new paintings are no longer flamboyant exercises rendered by a solo performer for the delectation of an astounded public; rather, they recognise the existence of a participatory viewership, and accept that the art-work must engage the viewer's attention more intimately, more intriguingly.

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