Galerie Mirchandani + Steinruecke is delighted to launch its space in Delhi with a solo exhibition by Aji V.N. Drawing from a poem by Jorge Luis Borges, the exhibition considers the qualities of the sensible world, which we hold within us partly as refracted forms, partly as memories.
Untitled, 2024, (Painting 4), oil on canvas, 49.2 x 78.7 inches (125 x 200 cm)
For the painter and the poet, light exists not in opposition to darkness, but in states of continuum, conveyed through minor and seismic dispatches of time. Aji’s paintings condense time within their frame – that of accumulated hours spent at the ever-renewing shoreline, or gazing out of a window. Whether situated at the oceanic horizon or amidst the vertical frame of trees, the vanishing point becomes a mediator between light and its dissolution. We discover the persistence of the world in conditions of dim visibility, and within the gradients of matter.
Aji’s paintings condense time within their frame – that of accumulated hours spent at the ever-renewing shoreline, or gazing out of a window.
Reflexive to the vastness of these paintings is the furtive intensity of drawings that relay an inhabited moment with a sense of immediacy. Here, we encounter the texture of terraqueous sites, boulders as capsules of time, and explorations of finite moments—brief encounters, solitary journeys, snapshots of scenes that will recur in other times, with other people. Shifting between the unknowable and intimately held, there are small portraits of Aji’s daughter, often with her gaze turned elsewhere or presented in an oblique profile that retains the quality of immersion and inwardness of the natural world—at once with us and somewhere beyond.
Arushi Vats