ART-PRESENTATION: Prabhavathi Meppayil
Prabhavathi Meppayil’s art practice draws on traditional craft and values the truth of materials and tools as well as simple forms, colors and shapes. The artist has arrived at a form of Abstraction via an exploration of a poetics of making rooted in an artisanal practice. The daughter of a goldsmith, she transposes the rudiments of an ancestral savoir-faire as the basis of a contemporary plastic language for critically revisiting the Modernist/Minimalist crux.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Pace Gallery Archive
For her solo exhibition Prabhavathi Meppayil begins her work by creating heavily layered fields of white gesso. For this exhibition, her work then falls into two groups: in the first, she embeds these gesso fields with thin copper and gold wires in linear arrangements. The wires lend both a material and chromatic quality to the work, interacting with ambient light and transforming in texture and tone as the wires oxidize. In the second group of work, Meppayil marks the gesso with repeated incisions made by a thinnam, a tool traditionally used by goldsmiths to imprint bangles with ornamental patterns. The process-oriented dimension of art-making to which she has been increasingly drawn over the last few years accords a primacy to materials and work implements: the markings that are the imprints left on a white surface by a range of goldsmith’s tools, notably thinnam, miniscule indents whose shapes depend on the particular inflection, the angle or bend, of the metal instrument’s tip. Seen from afar the impression is of a white square or rectangle barely differentiated from the white wall behind it, in middle distance, however, the object appears to be poised on an optical threshold, the source of a diffuse vibration or flickering, in close-up, a sensation verging on dizziness, as if speckles the color of white egg-shell had become visible to the eye without the aid of a microscope, a succession of hundreds of dashes endlessly extended and only brought to a parenthetical close by the vertical margins of the support. The gold is materially absent but metonymically present, and it is surely a marvel that at a stroke, as it were, she inscribes a local artisanal practice within a nexus of art historical issues – the poetics of the grid, the aesthetics of repetition, the optical atmospherics of the modernist monochrome versus earthbound minimalist objecthood – deemed to have been crucial for the very definition of a certain canonical Modernism. Meppayil’s approach to her work is forged through her family’s long history working as goldsmiths in Bangalore. Also in dialogue with Western postwar artists such as: Sol LeWitt, Agnes Martin and Robert Ryman.
Info: Pace Gallery, 537 West 24th Street, New York, Duration: 28/10-23/12/16, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, www.pacegallery.com
