Thus far Kiyomi Talaulicar's pictorial quiet has found itself placed slap bang in the middle of abstraction. But with The Avid Gaze one intends to relocate her works in the pacifist idiom. That said, no efforts have been directed towards entirely uprooting her linkages with abstraction. The two dispositions coexist, and allow the artist's new body of work to be read in a manner more vigorous than that allowed by mere rhetorical exchanges, which labour unendingly over matters of luminosity and other such.

Pacifism, of course, is easier said than done. And in Talaulicar's quasi-abstract still-lifes we witness this tussle, followed by a steady migration towards equilibrium. In the interiority of these paintings, composure is groomed by painterly qualities such as patience. With the application of each restrained layer the artist endeavours to countervail pessimism and other signs of discord that may have inflected her milieu, her temperament, and subsequently her work. At the end of this fairly longwinded route Talaulicar's paintings appear as though they have been cured by the sun and roundly weathered by the biosphere.

Since the politics of the personal was first thrown into relief, we have rarely encountered a dearth of anti-war sentiments in the contemporary arts, both Indian and otherwise. At the nucleus of Talaulicar's work rests the philosophy of pacifism, which announces itself as restraint in the business of everyday life. In her practice, the artist conveys this trajectory by yielding to her honed creative instinct. Surrender is critical to all artistic progress and process but often this natural arc is disrupted when foresight is blockaded by the temptation to fall in line with faddish manoeuvres. Talaulicar chases this principal plot of capitulation with an eye that gathers details.

Gitanjali Dang