New Delhi
Mona Rai
My Play Zero Mona Rai
Nature Morte is pleased to present Mona Rai’s third solo show with the gallery. For more than 40 years, the artistic practice of Mona Rai, on both canvas and paper, has been resolutely dedicated to abstraction. Her focus has often been coerced by her materials, exploring various pigments, metallic leafs, fabrics, glitter, even sand, gravel, dirt and ash. At the same time, she has explored the corporeal characteristics of her objects: slashing, suturing, burning and abusing both canvas and paper to rend objects into emotional states and aesthetic consciousness.
Rai’s work of the past few years, presented in this exhibition, has become more structured and less diverse in their materials, but certainly not reductive or minimal in any sense. The paintings use enamels that resemble nail lacquers: high-gloss saccharine and metallic colors with an iridescent sheen. These are layered in an abstract Pointillist style to create shimmering fields, fogs of shifting hues, and an optical cacophony. While working on paper, Rai has explored a greater diversity of materials and foundational structures. The grid is most predominant though hardly generic or sacrosanct. Rai violates the grid, disemboweling and dissecting it or paying attention to it only as a preliminary trajectory. The results are an abstraction that flirts with geometry and the organic, the gestural and the programmatic.
While much of Rai’s work of the past 40 years has been rooted in Nature and its manifestations in the animal, vegetable and mineral realms, her newest works take into account developments in Science. The new abstractions seem to be more responsive to language and its proliferation through technological means. Pixels, coding, digitization, and translation are her metaphors, similes, and allegories. Her imagery mimics the measuring of coordinates of time and space; she focuses through crosshairs trained on targets both near and far. The works on paper resemble mathematical algorithms while the paintings evoke the realm of sub-atomic particles and their illogical movements.
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