My work images are image of some surface where I get connected to it from my surroundings.There is a human natural tendency to feel the nature or anything which creates curiosity, and that curiosity gives inspiration to do my images through a process which is important to realize my existence and the language of my own.

- Santana Gohain

There and not there

Some of these works are, “like many animals and plants…sensitive to light and movement”, and that, the viewer, “becomes an interactive element in the work’s completion”, all the works combine to form an enchanting space, in which the presence of the viewer enables it to come alive.

On first encounter, the works appear implacably solid, massive, somber, and serious. The dark, metallic density of their surfaces weighs heavily on the walls of the gallery. Even the “white” works have a visual weight not immediately associated with paintings. There are connotations of permanence in their hard metal or stone-like surfaces, but they are in fact, very fragile constructions in graphite on paper and speak more about uncertainty in our perceptions.

The paintings are motionless but their surfaces are active, constantly changing as the viewer moves closer, looks from different angles, walks from one painting to another. These paintings are dark imperfect mirrors, like polished black granite, in which we may search in vain for definition. They are both “there” and “not there”.

“Image”, as it were, cannot be seen as an illusion in the work; it is the whole work itself, in its entirety. She sees the interior of the painting as an active space where things happen through a language of ambiguity rather than imposition. Santana’s paintings have a superficial likeness to Minimalism, but they are in fact, quite the opposite in temperament. The love of making is seen in the dexterity and subtlety with which these large surfaces are made. . In this unspoken dialogue between artist and media, marks mutate in accordance with modified intentions. They change shape, tone, texture, viscosity, and brilliance in order to reflect delicate gesture, emotion, tension, deliberation, and uncertainties.

Santana’s paintings reveal the habit of working; the discipline of serial work; the stoic acceptance of the slowness of process. This fastidiousness is necessary to achieve the materialisation of thoughts, ideas, and feelings, and acknowledges consequent delay in the realisation of aesthetic experience. It is the body, which “understands” the acquisition of habit and develops a harmony between intention and performance in our work in the given material. Tools used everyday by artists, become extensions to the body, in the same way that a blind man learns to perceive the space around him through the tip of his stick.

Drawn “writing”

The idea of a kind of “writing”, which is drawn, is a useful approach to an interpretation of these blocks of inscription found in the recent paintings. They should be considered as a form of drawing as much as insipient texts. Santana is working on the intersection between drawing and writing, which we might initially define as calligraphy. Calligraphy employs minute gestures in mark making with the fingertips, allowing individual characterisation and expression. But it also implies a distinction between the forms of letters and their “content”. In order to understand Santana’s interest in the common ground between drawing and writing we may also look at the paintings of so-called, Abstract Expressionists.

This desire to access pre-conventional states of experience is echoed in the atavistic notion of an adult’s re-connection with childhood experiences, again, “uncorrupted” by the learned thought processes of logic and reason. These memories may still have a vivid sense of reality for us, compared with our jaded current perceptions and may constitute an attractive route towards (re) discovering a truer sense of “identity”. I think Santana’s “texts” may embody all of these ideas, illustrating the earlier point that through juxtaposing paradoxical elements, art continually questions and remodels convention.

She has discovered a working method combining both physical working processes and meditative states of mind, in which actions and results are spontaneous. However, the results are not random indeed they have a kind of sublime order, each mark fits naturally between the one after and the one before. The mind is working at the just-below-conscious level, required by a performing concert pianist or any master craftswoman wielding her tools. It is not characteristic of a heightened consciousness but a heightened awareness, connecting her to all the paths of knowledge available to her.

This visual development is not a logical progression but an aesthetic phenomenon driven by a highly personal poetic imagination. Santana concurs, and deliberately “leavens” her work in mostly black, white or grey with fewer using red. The surfaces here, look like patched cloth with threads of “texts” woven, stitched, scratched or stained into them. Perhaps even more than the black or white works, they appear like layered fragments of varying ages, some more distinct than others, some lying in or on the surface, others faded, becoming almost indistinguishable, perhaps echoing the unreliability of memory. The artist has an unspoken dialogue with colour, which is not at all complicated, their conversation results in recognisable moods, of solemnity, calm and occasionally, delight.

Invisible movement

I recall a feeling of melancholy as we entered her studio in a relative twilight and surveyed the “empty” spaces, the stacks of boards in corners, closed cupboards, empty chairs, the worktables laid out with papers, tools, materials, all still and silent, temporarily use-less and in silence, waiting for work to resume.

Rows of dark paintings lined the walls and it was only as I walked towards these and began to look into them, that I discovered they were coming alive. They were being switched on, as it were, by the presence of moving people. The burnished surfaces absorbed and reflected continuously changing patterns of subtle colour and light. It was as though all the rich nuances of our surroundings, which were previously unremarkable, were drawn into them and re presented to us as if enhanced. It is remarkable that some works of art do seem to have this life of their own. They had known how beautiful the world is all along and as we acknowledged them, they revealed it to us.

- Peter Bevan, Sulptor, UK (2006,2008)

"ENCOUNTERS WITH RED"

A retrospective review of recent works by Santana Gohain in the exhibition, “Sense” at Gallery Motif, Delhi, 2014
Peter Bevan, Scotland 2015

Preface: “A rabbit and a crow.”

Ask a rabbit about his field and he could tell you more than you could possibly imagine. From the rabbit’s intimate world-view he could tell you about the softness, the smells, the warmth and sandy friability of the earth, where he dug the burrow amongst the supporting roots of a hawthorn bush. He could describe the touch of friction on his fur from the stems of grasses as he brushes through them on his long runs. He could tell of the grasses various fragrances, tastes and nutritional value. He might recall resting, very still, in open ground with the warm sun on his back, and with one eye open for potential predators. He might talk of the cosy crowding together with his family in the utter darkness deep inside the burrow.

But ask the rabbit what he looks like as he hops across the field and he would not be able to tell you, how could he?

But ask a crow, flying high in the sky above and he could tell you from his entirely different perspective. He would tell you how the rabbit is only one of a myriad of other creatures living in, and criss-crossing his field, and that this field is only one of a myriad of different kind of fields in the vicinity. But the crow would have no inkling of the rabbit’s intimate experience. One might think that to combine these two viewpoints would produce a more comprehensive understanding of this area of the natural world.

All artists have some kind of world-view and a sense of identity within it, but for many, this is not the only priority in their work. The physical and sensuous making of their art is a primary motive, a passion even, to learn about themselves in relation to the world around them. They, like the rabbit, are in the best position to tell us about their work. Their own conception and intimate experience of making it, far exceeds a viewer’s potential to fully comprehend it. As a practicing artist and an objective viewer, my task in reviewing Santana’s recent paintings is to try to both empathise with the immediate sensuous perception of her works (like the rabbit) and, to emulate the more detached viewpoint of the crow.

Note: All sentences or phrase in italics and quotation marks are attributable to Santana Gohain, 2012-2015

“Red is a space”

Some artists are perhaps, unusually sensitive to external stimuli, not only observing, but through all other senses, absorbing the phenomena they find in their living and working environments. Santana Gohain’s earlier works reflect the fascination she developed for the industrial surroundings of her then, studio. This was a steel works with all the smells, the grime, the perpetual black dust and the accompanying loud and piercing noises of the heavy machinery used in the incisive manipulation of steel; the cutting, bending, grinding and welding of sheet metal.

Rather than recoiling from this invasive environment, Santana embraced it. Through intensive observation and sensuous absorption of the nature of these hard materials and heavy industrial processes she developed paintings, which were dark, leaden, black or charcoal grey, tinged with rust coloured smears. These works are large, six feet high and four feet wide, with thick sides like great, monolithic slabs of heavy metal and when lined up in the gallery, they emanate a sense of implacable presence.

The surfaces of these works are intermittently cut into, etched, gouged, scraped scratched, scoured and penetrated by the marks of rough manufacturing. They are evidence of the extraordinary tenacity of Santana’s personal working practice. “Every small thing does matter and takes me near to nature and life”

The recent new paintings we are now considering, reflect a very different environment, a significantly softer textural world, but one equally dense and dynamic.

The artist has mentioned how significant the colour red seemed to her in childhood paintings, growing up in Assam. She lived in a beautiful and constantly changing landscape, with vibrant colours of flowers like, simuli and palash in bloom, and sunsets on the river Brahma Putra, glowing with orange and magenta. She was also aware of the red colour prevalent in the weaving and printed patterns of traditional dress, especially during festivals. When she moved to Gujarat in 1996, she found this colour equally prevalent in clothes and decorative fabrics and in the flowers of bougainvillea and golmahar. Santana emphasises the importance of personal choice in both everyday garments and for special occasions; how we project a sense of identity through the colour of clothes we wear. Her response to contemporary fashion colours is sensitively discriminating, whilst “borrowing” the bright, garish, even florescent colours we see everywhere on the street, in markets and malls, Santana’s working strategy is to subtly and radically change them.

These brash, simplistic colours form the structural foundations of her painting surface, onto and over these she applies numerous layers of thin, semi-transparent paint of darker tones of red, or various reddish hues or washes tinted with other colours. These additional layers dim the brightness of the foundation colours and multiply the variations in the qualities of redness in the work towards mauves, purples, warm browns and madders. The “red” becomes a “redness” of infinite variation. This continual overlaying of colour upon colour almost hides those below but do not entirely obliterate them: their presence can still be discerned beneath.

In this process the large painted surface becomes a “space” for exploring redness. A space in which Santana can discover, reveal and create her own sense of red in a considerate, but intuitive improvisation. These paintings expand and stretch the conventional identification or meaning of the word Red into a new realm, suggestive of infinite variation.

The importance of red for Santana is not as an abstract concept, merely different from say, yellow or blue, she doesn’t see it as a singular value. She creates and experiences the colour as a surface alive with an abundance of redness; it is intrinsic to the surface. It is the surface. Her focus on the physically tangible material of the painted surface emerges from the fascination with textile fabrication processes, woven and knitted fabrics, embroidery, crocheted lace-work, appliqué, decorative stitch-work, printed patterns, tapestry, but also with the varieties of materials used such as, flax, cotton, wool and silk.

This provides an infinitely rich resource from which Santana draws inspiration both for the beginnings of a painting and throughout its lengthy evolution to some kind of completion. The timing and rational for achieving this sense of finish, is often a mystery to the artist. It can be rarely predicted but somehow, the artist knows when it is time to stop; when the work becomes no longer just another painting, but a tangible presence in itself.

“Surface is for thinking”

Santana emphatically reminds us, that she does not stick pieces of fabric to her boards; the surface is all paper. But at a first glance of these paintings, one might be forgiven for assuming that they were constructed from actual textile fabrics glued or stitched together in panels and patches. However, on closer looking into the works, a discerning viewer will question that momentary impression. A more acute scrutiny reveals the subtle differences between stained and textured paint and the actual threads and weaves of real fabrics. These painted surfaces are indeed, to some extent mimetic, imitating textile materials but they are not “pictures” of textiles. The surfaces are made entirely of paper, layered, distressed and reconstituted. The artist describes tearing and peeling off the top layers of the thick paper exposing its internal fibrous nature and giving it a brushed-felt or cotton feel. If we watched her at work we might think this is a destructive process, a scarification; cutting, scratching and loosening the surface, leaving scars, evidence of bruising damage. But we should remember that the original paper has a machine-made finish, deliberately smooth and anonymous, like a fresh, new “blank canvas”. Santana however, must radically transform this homogeneity for it to become uniquely characterful and personalised. “My nature is to express everything on my intimate surface.”

This scarification is evident in all of the works for example, in the almost all-white painting where, in the variety of textured panels there are “text-like” markings, similar to those appearing in earlier work, reminiscent of obscure ancient and now unreadable inscriptions. Over many years Santana has developed a distinctive and idiosyncratic working process, even relishing painstaking and laborious repetitive actions by hand and by tools, including a very noisy electric engraving stylus. She rarely has a clear mental image of what she intends to make and this habit of working initiates the risk, inherent in each new work in turn. But as the blandness of the original paper is slowly transformed by hand and tool, an individual mystery is discovered, explored and revealed. This revelatory process emerges from the intuitive insight gained through experience of the behaviour of paper as a material and the critical awareness of its potential.

There is a fluid energy in these surfaces, the surface is a work-in-progress, a surface for creative thinking, a merging of feeling and thought perhaps beyond mere consciousness. For the artist it is a “journey of desire and experience on paper and through paper.’ Artists like Santana are inspired by the visual and textural qualities of materials and media they use, and also enjoy the pleasure of fine craftsmanship, of hard work but well done. They are interested both in how the work looks and also in how it comes to be. There is for an artist, a pleasurable experience of delight and sometimes astonishment at the beauty in a work, which appears to be just “right” in all respects and may be called “finished”. This feeling can be reciprocated in the viewer in front of a “surface for thinking”.

Encounters with paintings

To meet someone you are immediately attracted to and with whom, there slowly develops a more and more intimate conversation is perhaps a relatively rare experience. For this kind of close encounter to occur between a viewer and a work of art is perhaps, even rarer. But it has happened to me when I encountered Santana’s earlier black works. But again in early March 2015, on going to see one of the new red paintings in a private collection in Vadodara and the seeing the rest in the Motif Gallery in Delhi.

I had previously only seen photographs of the paintings in her exhibition catalogue and was curious and intrigued by the dramatic change with a new colour dominance in her work, although not entirely enthralled by these photographic reproductions. But on encountering the actual paintings I was pleasurably astonished by the extraordinary richness and vivacity of these real surfaces, they were persuasive invitations for an intimate engagement.

The motif of a lotus flower dominates in one of these large paintings; I roughly counted about 300, but there was no indication of a rigid pattern or repetition. Each motif was unique and they suggested a wonderfully infinite variation of type, an elegant curvilinear stem and flower head. Some were clustered, some singular and were spread in improvised traceries across the whole surface, including over seven internal panels, roughly rectangular. These panels and the motifs are articulated by a scarified surface rendering them like the raised stitched shapes in embroidery and tapestry. The overall colour of the painting is a dense red, but enriching and enlivening this solid presence is a wide range of variant reds, in tone and hue values from cadmium to crimson, magenta to mauve, to purple and with hints of orange and flecks of bright red. The painting is further animated by the darker browns of burnt sienna, close to the colour of dried blood, with which the flowing linear tracery is drawn.

These paintings respond to the ambient lighting because of the various sheens and textures on the surface. As the viewer moves about in front of the work, looking from different angles, yet more variations of tone and colour appear and disappear as though the painting was alive and breathing. This encounter with the work lasted about an hour, rather longer than the first glance. It became a stimulating exchange, between the painting and me, something like a pleasurable confluence between aliens.

Santana’s paintings perform at best in low light levels, perhaps like dyed coloured fabrics will eventually fade if over-exposed to bright sunlight, the subtlety and intensity of colours and hues in her works will also dim as though drained of energy, in the bright lights of a “white cube.”

Another painting which again contains approximately three hundred flower motifs, this time, of roses, comes alive in dim light. Each rose flower and stem, faintly delineated, is a uniquely drawn variation of the motif, in the colours of rosewood and each, has a kind of waxy sheen. In contrast, the ground surface on which these motifs appear to float, is a non-reflective matt, like brushed felt or velvet. In this ground there are repeated swirls or loosely curving patterns in the brushed marks. They suggest various directions of flow but also indicate the pressure and extent of Santana’s hand movements in brushing each small area at a time, one after another until the whole background surface is covered. These surface ripples are like the eddies produced by light breezes skimming over the still waters of a pond. The painting becomes kinetic, shimmering as the viewer changes the angle or height of viewing. It is neither a textile surface, nor a picture of a bed of roses; it is an object with a sensuous presence.

“Image appears as an object”

Although most of the paintings in this exhibition depict in some way, floral elements, one of the most distinctive works, like the almost all white work, discussed earlier, does not. Unlike the white painting, this one is entirely red and appears to have no representational references at all, except perhaps to architectural geometry and the abstract proportions of the human body. Its surface, including the deep side panels, consists of an arrangement of mostly rectangular shapes of different sizes and proportions, from very small to large in relation to the overall board size. Each panel is precisely delineated and coloured individually, some are horizontally, some vertically aligned in a rhythmic relationship to one another. But like in some of Mondrian’s works, there is no interpretive ambiguity; to think of a patchwork quilt or a patchwork of fields seen from the air, is meaningless. There is no material variation in surface texture from panel to panel; it is only the size and the hue and tone of its colour that varies. The whole surface is implacably and uniformly flat. However, the third dimension is there, in the thickness of the wooden side panels to which the surface board is fixed, giving it significant depth and presents the viewer with the sense of singular object, rather than just an image on a surface. It is perhaps, a truly abstract entity. One feels a sense of fraternity with its stature and presence, a true exchange. If you look at it for long enough, it starts to look back at you.

In my long familiarity with Santana’s work, I feel there is an enduring continuity in her keenly perceptive awareness of the materials in her world. But this physical preoccupation is fused with an underlying autobiographical sensitivity. She has the capacity to feel personally integrated into the world, with nature, history and with ever-changing human technology. This sense of wholeness is its honesty and perhaps, its spirituality. “Whatever comes to me in my life experiences, I try to catch it in my work. This is the only outlet to express my desire in art”. But Santana’s work is not egotistical self-expression, her individuality and sense of identity arises in the paintings as she works through her physical and conceptual practice, it is not the goal.

In my experience of her work, there has never been even a hint of the representation of the human figure, least of all self-portraiture. But in 2015, for the first time, I see her shadow in one of these new paintings. The surface of this work is covered with many hundreds of tiny, paper cut-out flower motifs with five petals. There is no regular geometric spacing but a more intuitive or natural placing. However, the whole rectangle of the surface is bisected with an irregular diagonal edge. To the left of this line, the tiny flower motifs are clustered closely together creating a lighter tone of the magenta ground colour. To the right of the line, the spacing is wider, revealing more of the ground colour and therefore, creating a darker tone. The painting reminded me of seeing in late springtime, the ground around the base of certain trees covered by carpets of tiny blossoms. After realising this phenomenon, I began to see the painting not as a flat surface but as a level ground and saw that the darker half of the surface took on a more identifiable shape, a human shape, the shadow of a person. Is it my shadow, the shadow of the viewer, or is it the shadow of the artist? I slowly became sure it was hers.

“My work is not finished”. But each work is finished but not finished, in the sense that it also presents to the artist and to the viewer, the possibilities of variations and alternatives in her future works.

- Peter Bevan, Sulptor, UK (April, 2015)

LILAC SONATA

Kumara Gandharva, the legendary vocalist in the Indian classical tradition once gave a very interesting justification of his inclusion of a varjya swara- an adverse note in a particular Raga. He said that the swara was coaxing me repeatedly to let it in. I could not help oblige. The new series of Santana’s work would remind the viewers of that anecdote. A few elements that were never a part of her parlance earlier are surfacing in her recent work and like the vivadi swara in Kumarji’s rendering, these elements are enriching it further. Her somber, contemplative idiom still retains its usual pondering, pensive disposition but ushers in a lyrical, redolent note of color into it. The rustic siennas and grays are now replaced with yearning, pining mauves and magentas.

Santana keeps experimenting with the surface of her work and has adopted extremely dreary methods that necessitate intense physical involvement to achieve the desired results. She uses cotton fiber paper, mounted on board in place of canvas. To give it cotton like feel, she peels off the top layer of the paper. Earlier, she meticulously replicated the appearance of copper or rusted tin sheets in her work and to achieve that effect she used to work with her bare palms on this surface. Her fascination for the sheer physicality of the surface ensues into scratching, rubbing and caressing the surface of her ‘painting’ till it gets vulnerable and concedes to her volition. In her recent work she engraves the surface with minute patterns and motifs generated through the dotted lines using the motorized engraving tool. These small engraved patches that bear the tactility of embroidered fabric fit together like an angular jigsaw puzzle and appear like an aerial view of the patches of tilled fields or resemble with the quilts stitched out of rags by the village women.

The first painting of this series that she engraved, divulges an intricate play of patterns and textures in white but as said earlier, this is where a few small patches of mauve crept into her work, though very small, very conspicuous due to the sharp contrast with the rest of the surface. These mauves and purples spread all over the surface in her later work and are followed by many other elements and objects, mainly flowers and floral motifs which otherwise were never seen in her idiom before, noticeably transmuting her vocabulary.

Interestingly, her manner of building up the forms and application of colors divulge a marked analogy with musical expression. Like a musician, who opens the recitation with distinct notes and goes on overlapping those notes with the new ones to build up a composition - sonata or Raga; Santana too begins with distinct forms and colors but goes on masking them with hues of mauve and purple. Colors and forms, contrary to their nature get ephemeral in her work but they do leave behind their traces and memories. They are transient like the musical notes that surrender their individual subsistence to the totality of the rendition. The flowers cease to be flowers, the greens and blues relinquish their effulgence and they subscribe to the nostalgic, melancholic musings of the painter.

- Deepak Kannal, Art Historian and Critic (2015)