Dhruvi Acharya: Evaporating Voices

Nature Morte recently announced an online Viewing Room with Dhruvi Acharya’s new group of works on paper titled Evaporating Voices. The Viewing Room is an avenue for the gallery to showcase new works being made by our artists. In lieu of the current lack of actual exhibitions in our gallery space, the Viewing Room provides a deep immersion into the artist’s practice. Dhruvi Acharya had made these works during the period that has come to be known as 'the lockdown' due to the Covid-19 virus. Confined within our homes, unable to socialize, for a period of three months has been a startling experience for most people. As the lockdown is lifted hesitantly, we each have the choices to venture out or remain in as much or as little as we feel comfortable doing. The virus, they say, will be with us forever, our vigilance against coming in contact with it certainly at the forefront of our minds for many months to come.

The vocabulary of Acharya’s paintings and watercolors has been developing consistently for the past twenty years. She continues a long reign of figurative art which has dominated India for most of the past 100 years. This vocabulary of the figurative has mostly concentrated on female subjects and mostly eschewed any tendencies towards the saccharine, the amiable, and the jovial. In fact, Acharya’s depictions, in general, can said to verge on the psychologically uncomfortable. Anxiety, neurosis, paranoia, and dread are frequent states to be found in her works, her subjects very much alive and interacting with each other, often involved in conflict and confusion. Life, and all its convoluted dramas, is the main subject of Acharya’s art, her characters only ciphers within which the viewer can recognize herself and her own foibles.

It comes as no surprise, then, that Acharya’s art during this period of isolation has become more abstract, her actresses disembodied and vanquished by repetition. The long period of silence and reflection has brought Acharya to a freedom which releases her from both herself and others, bringing her to a new reflection of the world. Gasps for help and evaporating voices seem lost within a clouded stream of consciousness. There is oppression within the silence but some things remain familiar: the longing for happiness, the monotony of the journey, an instinct for escape, bewilderment, and an anguished countenance amid sentimental songs. Patterning, for the artist, represents the maze of thoughts we wander through, moving mechanically amid a failure of communication. Acharya’s colors portray a heavy mist that hangs over her subjects, tremulous and fugitive. In some works, the background of an abandoned city stands in stoic repose. Acharya’s works may be brooding yet they still defend the promise that we will be rewarded by the gestures of our friends, by arms that open, and by warm smiles.

Talking about her work gallerist and artist Peter Nagy adds, 'It comes as no surprise, then, that Acharya’s art during this period of isolation has become more abstract, her actresses disembodied and vanquished by repetition. The long period of silence and reflection has brought Acharya to a freedom which releases her from both herself and others, bringing her to a new reflection of the world. Gasps for help and evaporating voices seem lost within a clouded stream of consciousness. There is oppression within the silence but some things remains familiar: the longing for happiness, the monotony of the journey, an instinct for escape, bewilderment, and an anguished countenance amid sentimental songs. Patterning, for the artist, represents the maze of thoughts we wander through, moving mechanically amid a failure of communication. Acharya’s colors portray a heavy mist that hangs over her subjects, tremulous and fugitive. In some works, the background of an abandoned city stands in stoic repose. Acharya’s works may be brooding yet they still defend the promise that we will be rewarded by the gestures of our friends, by arms that open, and by warm smiles.'

View the exhibition at : http://viewingroom.naturemorte.com/evaporatingvoices