ABSTRACT TALES

Sunil Padwal’s art is about all that is lost

Alost object, a found emotion and in between, a great emptiness. Only if you belonged to both the worlds, you’d know that in between lies that great void. Like a barber’s chair, and the forgotten newsprint reimagined on canvas. The broken chair that was fixed is how life works where we are always repairing our broken selves to keep the void at bay, the artist says. These canvases contain letters you wrote, words you could never articulate, says Mumbai-based artist Sunil Padwal. He creates an antidote to that emptiness on canvases full of memories and lines that elongate the past for his solo show that opened at Gallery Ske in New Delhi ahead of the India Art Fair. Almost empty drawers line the walls, a hanger indicates the absence of clothes in this collection of found objects redrawn, recreated and reassembled to make an archive of longings. There is a cabinet with old photographs and other everyday objects to resemble a kiosk of storytelling. Padwal believe in abstraction but when you begin to view the objects in a context of his emphasis on emptiness, you hit upon a lyrical note of longing for what is now only a fleeting memory of a humble middle-class life that manifests itself in the objects.

Like a song you don’t remember but you recall the emotion. “Someone else has touched and we wanted to elongate that line of memory,” he says. “The moment you use it in the gallery, the functionality is twisted. The drawings are all about present and past and how the past is governing my present. There is a certain emotion I didn’t know how to articulate the emotion. I let the line be.”

For Padwal, the hardware parts, the typewriter and the rest are an archive. “A broken chair is a work of art. When I add my elements and I am putting my own emotions. If I am reading News or a poem, it makes its way into these canvases,” he says.

Padwal grew up in the dense and congested lanes and alleyways of South Mumbai in the 1980s and says he formed a deep connection to the streets and the objects, machines, animals and social drama that unfolded in these lanes.

AT Gallery Ske, Vasant Kunj, New Delhi, till March 2, 2019