The master of the metaphor Rameshwar Broota spent a few minutes ruminating over the works of Surinder Kaur and said: I have seen Surinder working for herself, for her art exists in itself, it does not really represent any trend but her work is about tones and colours and the experience that we call ‘anubhav'. Rameshwar's words echo the dulcet confluence between colour and contour in this show of Surinder Kaur that speak to us like a visual mosaic of moody rhythms in time.
Though they look superficially the same, these works actually remind you of trends in Minimalist architecture deserving of the name pares itself down not in the pursuit of style points but in an effort to frame the relationship between solid and void, nature and culture, and color and its absence — and to explore how the eye sees and the mind understands those differences. This is Surinder Kaur in the simplicity of intent that does not seek the narrative but seeks to unravel the aesthetic in wholesome manner of sweeping a gamut of spaces in tonality.
The fragility of our understanding of the materiality of atmospherics and the candid tonality of the spontaneous is nowhere more manifest than it is in the art of the watercolour. Every watercolour in this show constitutes a study in several kinds of paradox. ‘Watercolours are a sense of play, another mood that comes and passes so quickly I am unaware that it even came. I enjoy doing watercolors and often I think of the great abstract masters' says Surinder.At a formal level, while the wispiness of the colour conveys a weight of permanence and enduring value, in our memory she makes us recall elements in time of the earthy landscapes of the abstract expressionists, for Surinder the ochre tonality may just be the baked earth from which the colours made render it fragile, frangible, and fascinating.
There is, however, a more crucial paradox to be considered in this context of the creation of the watrecolour. It springs from the fact that the contemporary artist is no longer content with the hereditary realistic marriage of beauty and obviousness, but for the abstractionist in Surinder there is pleasure and usefulness in the making of the framed cohesive creation. The contemporary artist is tempted, instead, to turn the watercolour into a thing of moody moorings, and sometimes an even impractical, beauty autonomous of purpose; and yet, at the same time, the practical demands that continue to be made upon such an exercise require from it a promise of intent.
This latter paradox impinges most urgently on the activity of the moment of creation, and may be described as a confluence between the thinking mandate and the translated mandate, between form and felicity. It is perfectly exemplified in these watercolours.
As an artist who works on canvasses, known for her soft and feathery strokes and techniques, these works revel in a variety of registers. If she has produced pure colourative strains -, she has also created a hint of male figures in the pursuit of sheer delight and experimented with abstract forms.
This combination of womanlike finesse and artistic vision is, with Surinder, a matter of her personal evolution as well as training under Rameshwar Broota.And yet, despite her undoubted versatility and her ability to conjure up works of intriguing and elegant thought, Surinder does not renounce the relative importance of memory in her work. In some ways Surinder makes us think of a practice in the hierarchy of art that now acquires the abstract and transcendent quality of “pure art”, which is believed to occupy a superior place in that hierarchy.
Obviously Surinder recognizes that art always has internal contradictions and confluences that are implicit in this stance, which represents the triumph of colour over contour, it is also as if the boundaries of the creative idiom would have been transgressed. In a word, the composition would be retrieved from the circuit of recognition and transported into the aesthetic circuit of pure pleasure.
The abstracted domain shaped and textured in limpid and subtle shades of varied hues punctuates the exhibition; the blue and mottled brown surfaces approximate the look of metal, but the creases deliberately belie the simulation. Elsewhere, the hard basic form of the spatial readings is placed in counterpoint to a soft adornment that departs radically from it: relatively plain surfaces are sometimes are crowned with elaborate striations, planes with uncluttered lines are given rococo texturing.
In all these evocative canvasses Surinder plays off dialectic between apparent softness and actual hardness; she also orchestrates a quintessentially sculptural dialogue between stability and precariousness here, with each human figure subtly balancing delicately between gravity's summons and the lightness of air.
Sometimes you can sense the restraint and sometimes the rhythm of life's tenors.
But there is strength in the artist's quiet restraint and an undeniable striving for a tranquil sense of perfectionism. Painting for Surinder is nowhere near a high-wire act. A single quietly conceived design gesture or choice of texture could be the fulcrum of an innate balance.
Purity of intent in the creation of a quiet code of kinetics makes these works the stuff of unifying aesthetics. A patent of infinite patience and an alertness of the inner spirit create in the canvasses a concert of colourative strains that never tire the discerning eye. This show speaks in the tenured classics of an artist's conversation with colour in her own understanding and ruminations of life's many associations and experiences. Elements react and interact in the spaces that will sense their quietude. This show then is about rhythmic ins and outs, where a quasi-abstract feel rests in the hollow of our own thoughts. The longer you look at these works-and you have to do it in person because the gestural quality of colour can only felt close up-you realize that Surinder Kaur is an artist to be enjoyed, followed and perhaps an able advocate of abstract expressionism with a man hovering somewhere sometime.
