Harvesting Light: Sheetal Gattani
"I want to be able to look at the painting, and, for a few seconds, associate it with nothing—to let the painting decide what it is."
In an age saturated by relentless visual stimuli, Harvesting Light, Sheetal Gattani’s exhibition of paintings curated by collector Anurag Khanna, offers a rare refuge: the freedom of having nowhere to be and nowhere to go, except to remain in the moment and experience the unhurried beauty of seeing—an antidote to the nanosecond thrills of infinite scrolling.
Spanning more than three decades, the works present themselves as self-contained little sanctuaries, evoking neither myth nor memory. Drenched in colour, they cascade from a black so profound that it seems to block out all other life. This sets the stage for new beginnings and endings, as Gattani intuitively adds and erases multiple layers of paint to the darkened field in an adventurous exploration of texture. “What makes these paintings so incredibly rich is the presence of the black lurking deep within them... and
the complex layering which gives them a sense of time...” wrote the late artist Mehlli Gobhai.
Unexpected colours and mysterious forms, touched by a beam of light, appear and disappear in a play of shadows. They tantalise and disrupt, then embrace and part, as, bit by bit, a story is seeded on paper and canvas. The chief protagonist of this narrative is not a beloved image, object, or buried emotion, but the rigorous process by which Gattani deliberately dismantles and obliterates the familiar. Purposeful slashes are angled and sculpted into the raised areas of the canvas, accentuating the line while giving it a distinct spatial dimension; raw incisions intentionally fracture dominant surfaces of heavyweight reds and deep greens, revealing an underworld of floating
specks, dashes, and penumbras.
Gattani is not hiding any secrets in her meticulously created abstract universe. The viewer is free to enter this space and construct an alternative reality in which the swathes of colour enveloping the painting are reminiscent of an immersive, contemplative ascetic; micro-incidents manifest as fantastical, living, breathing creatures; and random grey strokes appear as ghostly evocations of ancient columns and altars.
But what is it that the artist herself wants?
“I am only interested in the present. I want to be able to look at the painting and, for a few seconds, associate it with nothing—to let the painting decide what it is. It is this approach that transforms Harvesting Light into an unwavering meditation on colour, surface, proportion, and scale, rooted in the belief that within these seemingly tangible elements lies a deeper, almost transcendent ‘philosophical truth’.”
