Painting exhibition attracts Ahmedabad residents

AHMEDABAD: A river of nostalgia flows down the scroll, winding its way through forgotten landscapes and ruins of monuments. All within hues and tints of the blue canvas! Liberating itself from the everyday world, the paintings are born from the artist’s memory. Kakoli Sen’s exhibition of painting ‘Strolling Down Memory Lane’ at the Hutheesing Visual Art Centre, has a dream-like quality.
The work is a reiterating engagement with Khalil Gibran’s lines, ‘But let there be spaces in your togetherness and/ Let the winds of heaven dance between you/ Love one another, but make not a bond of love/ Let it rather be a moving sea between the shores of your souls’
“I have read these lines many a times since I was a teenager,” says Sen for whom the act of creating an art work is a personal indulgence. “A painting evolves on its own. Most of my responses are automatic. The paint guides my hand.” Like the art of automatic writing tapping onto the sub-conscious.
But within the blues of the canvas, many stories are hidden. A prolific reader, history and mysteries fascinate Sen. “I love stories and I was always captivated by fairytales. As a child and later as a mother — reading stories to my children, some anecdotes leave their germ behind, which finds its way to the canvas,” adds Sen.
Filled with symbols like old letters, a compass — showing directions, a grandfather clock ticking off days, hours, months, “with an annoying certainity”, architectural ruins — symbolizing our fast fading culture, a sailing boat — representing journey, abundance and prosperity, coax the viewer to unravel its hidden story.
Also, her exploration breaks away from the 2D surface of the canvas into an installation — wooden boats going around the wheel of time — suspended in the middle of the gallery. Sen who started with realistic paintings, has now gradually been veering towards abstract expressionism. Her works are on display till May 4.