Rajvi Dedhia Unadkat

An invisible, delicate balance keeps things from falling apart in the universe. This is not to say that things are always perfect, but nature has a way of balancing out eventually. When one looks closely, encounters with the dichotomies of living often unravel the fabric of continuance and the purpose of life in the most remarkable of ways.

Good art is known to have an inherent duality and there in lies its precise tight-wire walking eloquence. Be it in the contrast of colours, lines, forms, ideologies and aesthetics, the conflict zone of a canvas, reveals more than it conceals, an artist’s true intent in the work. When artists take it upon themselves to create art in a way that exudes this intricate balance, the work of art thus created, stands on its own foundation and gets lauded. Any famous art work from any era from the world over, has subtly contributed to our visual culture because of its balance and resoluteness. Artist Rajvi Dedhia Unadkat is one such artist who echoes that balance in her works of art.

The art works of Rajvi oscillate between the familiar and the unfamiliar, the known and the unknown, the controlled and the carefree. One can see this duality arising in her style and rendition of the compositions. Rajvi chooses to keep her works ‘untitled’ and aptly so, as they are negotiations of a space which presents a delicious ambiguity of coexistence. The palette is maintained neat and austere, limiting the colours and hues to neutral greys and off whites, beiges and blacks. Any hint of a bright colour, albeit rare, is only to instill a precisely timed deflection of the monotony in the visual or thought process.

Rajvi’s work dwells in multiple layers and sensibilities which collide and coalesce on the pictorial surface for they unobtrusively replicate the rhythm of life itself. Movement juxtaposed with a deep stillness, textural nuances set against the absolute lack of it, synergise the composition. This leads the eye to wander and question the journey through her volatile inner worlds.

Rajvi completed her BFA from the Sir JJ School of Art, Mumbai and went on to further graduate from Chelsea college of Art and Design, UK. The young artist has been trained in print making during her education at the Sir JJ School of Art, and this probably informs the techniques that present themselves in her intricately layered works.

In her earlier paintings from 2010, one witnesses the fresh experimentation of a young artist exploring various mediums, thoughts, ideas and the crossing over beyond barriers set by tangible and intangible conditionings. This method of inquiry is still evident in her recent works from 2017, where the visual language changes and becomes more focused and uniquely abstract.

There is a specific affinity to the verticality of things in her recent works which one would notice has become more pronounced than before, as she covers a painted canvas half way with strips of an older painted canvas. The new painted surface, sharing space with fragments of an old work, laid out in vertical strips (like the keys of a piano), becomes part of a silent contestation. Rajvi reveals her love for piano music by one of her favourite composer, Ludovico Enaudi as one of her inspirations.

In some of the other works, the original layer is rich in textures, made with metallic paints, closely laid out vertical lines drawn on to the canvas directly to bring out depth, and the sudden controlled row of vertical strips, aimed to create an interesting polarity of form and structure. As the eye moves over the strips and dips into the crevices between them, the work comes alive giving the intense depths their rightful acknowledgement.

The artist’s works have also been influenced by her travels, as in from Mumbai to London, and then on to New York, and back to London. These travels could also have impacted her distinct abstract narratives, especially evidenced in her recent works. The flow and ebb of the elements in the compositions are metaphors of an unspoken pulse, which Rajvi has felt deeply and embedded within her meditative works. This is one artist who has her hand on the pulse of the inner and outer realms which she inhabits, while her art works deftly mirror the rhythm of Life