ART CITIES:Brussels-Jitish Kallat
Jitish Kallat was born in 1974 in Mumbai where he currently lives, the artist works with a variety of media including painting, sculpture, photography and installation. In his art and practice he develops his deep engagement with the city of Mumbai. Among his main topics the artist investigates globalization, urbanization, social and economic.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Galerie Daniel Templon Archive
Jitish Kallat presents “Covariance”, his first solo exhibition at Galerie Daniel Templon in Brussels. With a complex body of works in mixed media (drawing, collage, sculpture, photography), the exhibition brings forth several new dimensions to some of his long-standing artistic inquiries. Covariance delves into ideas of time, sustenance, sleep, vision and perception along with a compelling interplay of scales and proximities, and evocations of the celestial and the cosmological, preoccupations that have recurred across Kallat’s wide-ranging work. He combines astronomy and geophysics in a pair of intricately detailed sculptures titled “Covariance” (Sacred Geometry) that from afar may resemble a rock/an anthill/a fallen meteorite/an ancient fossil. Look closely, and you’ll find pairs of finely carved, tiny eyes modelled on different species, from mammals and birds to reptiles and fish. A new suite of meditative works on paper are titled “Wind Study—Hilbert Curve”, as the artist says: “This represents “Transcripts derived by eavesdropping on a silent conversation between wind and fire. My drawings derive their form from Hilbert Curves, continuous fractal space-filling curves first described by the German mathematician in 1891”. Kallat also brings in the humble papaya fruit. A large photographic triptych titled “Sightings Gen-Pap-D23M6Y2016” unveils a close up of a papaya’s surface and you could be looking at telescopic snapshots of cosmic supernova explosions, contemplating the macro as manifesting within the micro. The artist then pursues his stimulating reflection on the dissimular and a possibly inverted geometry of life with “Antidote”, a playful and contemplative sculpture of a bat sleeping effortlessly upturned while pulling against gravity. The exhibition course ends up with a room dedicated to “Tetralemma” a series of drawings folded as if a solitary game of exquisite corpse was underway.
Info: Galerie Daniel Templon, Veydtstraat 13A, Brussels, Duration: 7/9-28/10/17, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 11:00-18:00, https://templon.com
![Jitish Kallat, Sacred Geometry (Covariance) [Deatail], 2017, Dental plaster, 109 x 86 x 61 cm, Courtesy the artist and Galerie Templon](http://www.dreamideamachine.com/web/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/Covariance-détail.jpg)
