“Flittering Thoughts” by Vipta Kapadia

“Flittering Thoughts” by Vipta Kapadia

With incredible mastery of colour and portraying peace in paintings, Artist Vipta Kapadia showcases her exhibition of paintings from 3^rd December to 9^th December, 11am to 7pm at Jehangir Art Gallery. Vipta has been painting for over thirty years and her solo exhibition of these recent works is aptly titled “Flittering Thoughts”. Capturing thoughts that flit through her consciousness through the day are the recent oil on canvas works of Mumbai-based artist Vipta Kapadia. Some thoughts dart by in a fraction of a second, while others linger long, yet all find expression on her engaging abstract works.

Vipta Kapadia's long lasting engagement with painting in this solo show is an intricate part of her journey from the distance travelled to the distances yet to be traveled. Vipta intervenes her familiar idiom with her new enquiries on form and content relationships. Seemingly similar engagements open up new enquiries each time, as she stops and thinks about her language while continuing to exploit her known dictum. Here, Vipta explores the nature of relationship between form and content with a newly established bond between the nature of thoughts and its impact on human body. As they appear and reappear leaving no identifiable substance, yet straining chaos and identifying human subsistence as the core.

Vipta's large paintings (Untitled 1 and Untitled 2) in their embodiment of the grey and the green hues suggest hazy appearances of- say, kaput human feelings and a torso, only to transcend these identifications and educe an expression of fulfillment. This transience from mutation of 'form' itself into a fluid content wherein description of body, object, place or a thing is pulverized, is enormously occupying sap that forms her language. The large Blue canvas that leaves an impression of eroded wall is again contained within herself, who as a benign and calm being interrogates the cities and places with her meditative silence. Thoughts that appear and reappear, yet observed with a distance, not reacted upon, resolve Vipta's language as addressing a consistent dictum that is non-violence.

Vipta's small paintings all untitled emerge from her focus on absent power between human intellect and the acquired knowledge. Volatile representations of sofas and books indicate a converse aesthetic in the dialogues between people who presumably have just left. Their inner chaos and tearing mental distances acquire the spaces of silent interrogation in Vipta's paintings. Vipta is that distant observer of these dialogues who listens to the silence of the left behind objects- the sofas and the books. From within chaos within; and converse dialogues must emerge a pathway that leads one towards self-knowledge. In consequence, Vipta identifies the layered human struggle to comment upon 'ignorance' which the books propounding 'pure knowledge' may not yield. Vipta's consistent dictum to address non-violence is in her silence towards the world that speeded up towards high success termed as competition.

Vipta's other small works wherein she lets the chaos wash out between two shifting vertical planes suggests her mental configuration of the construction waste which is urban. In every possible way, and seemingly repetitive engagements through her silence Vipta addresses non-violence as a strategy to observe the world.