In the last few years, a dynamic and productive interplay has emerged in Gobhai’s art between two contending mandates: pictoriality and objecthood. On the one hand, the artist is attracted to a sensuous painterliness that commits him to a tactile eroticism of surface, an enjoyment of the associations that it conjures up, the challenge of delivering a persuasive image. On the other hand, he is tempted to assert the claim of the work of art to being an object among other objects, possessing a specific presence and the ability to exert a field of gravitational attraction around itself. Gobhai has been working towards entities that we should perhaps describe as ‘image-objects’. Provocations to the viewerly imagination, because they resist conventional typologies based on form and genre, these image- objects are not reducible either to painting or sculpture, but draw on the strengths of both practices.
The earliest manifestation of such an image-object was the triad of incised and painted wooden cubes that Gobhai produced for ‘Hinged by Light’, an exhibition devoted to the conceptual departures staged by three leading abstractionists, which I curated and mounted in January 1994. Since 2002, especially, successive suites of Gobhai’s work have oscillated in temperament between pictoriality and objecthood.
– Ranjit Hoskote, ‘Pictoriality and Objecthood: Mehlli Gobhai, Recent Work’ (2011)