My work does not directly engage with any particular social or political issue, it takes on a more individual, introspective and autobiographical role in terms of a mental response or reaction towards the issues that we as humanity are trying to grapple with. My work engages with the constant changes that we collectively have to adjust and adhere to, my paintings move from chaos and hysteria, to depiction of hope and serenity, emotions every individual would feel in different circumstances and situations, to finally realization and comprehension of life’s processes, of understanding that everything is, has been and will be in a constant state of Flux (change). And even in destruction and chaos something new and stable is created. My work tries to explore the changing mental landscape of the human mind.
PERFORMATIVE FORMS
This work? A design of pure rhythmic movement. The thrust and sweep of forms, spreading from a spiral core, and as are often perfectly organized in relation to one another, One may perhaps trace suggestions of natural movement--a dancer poised on heel or toe; the sweep of upraised arms; the line of a scythe; the curve of a sail filled by the wind; the spread of a bird’s wing. From such things and from spiral formation of certain growths, the vortex of movements. These forms, then, seem to have been extracted, assembled or woven together into new vital units.
Or let us say, over here is an attempt at beauty of sheer velocity expressed in terms of the human torso in the dance. Poise, grace and vitality personified and given their fullest expression in the techniques of some performative forms. So that this work could be compared to the somewhat similar compositions in all abstractly geometric art patterns or of dynamic designs.
The premises of the latest in line digital compulsions have, in one way, little to contribute to an assessment of this artist’s work. We can only avoid bringing to his organically informed, mesmerizing invocations, irrelevant pre-conceptions of appreciation and judgment if we attempt to situate them in relation to such current artistic meanings to which he, by choice, does not align his spirit.
While Goyal is no outsider to whatever is loosely deemed as ‘Modernism’, the imaginative qualities that he frequently seems to project in his work are drawn from the still living Nritya tradition and which is so largely reflected in the Indian dance forms. Forms, both art wise in their higher rung, as much as in the rites, rituals and ‘spiritistic’ communions of the folk. You just have to watch his key images to realize this aspect of his genre. Well, even if any other artists happen to share his unusual vision, his own acute, spare symmetry steeped manner takes his compound creations to an elevated plane. They become artistically compelling; his geometrical rhythms suggesting a movement which energizes and quickens our pulse.
So that this art is a sort of resurgence; its rapidity facing forwards and inwards; is of images of crisp equilibrium and suspense, where the natural and the supernatural are as if engaged in a tete-a-tete. The works owe only a little to the apparent or observed reality. The ovoid images exist purely to act as the vehicle of a visionary world that is the instrument of possession and emotive purgation. In other words, they exist as an interior analogue which seeks to orientate and drive the viewer’s contemporary consciousness towards the realization of awakened primal possibilities, and away from those of the day’s excessively bland, unreasonably rational, machine made urban mass humanity. In their import the drawn images are almost iconic and as such their presiding paradigm is the contemplation of the twilight zone’s protean, creatively restless minds. His predisposition towards envisaging the vibrating sea of our inner world is timely. He manifests it as charged with the traces of the fabulous, much as is realized, for instance, via a theatre of meaning-pregnant, surprising possibilities, of strange specters and visitations Goyal has, in sum, been at pains to personify experiences, to reveal the identity, the nuance, the composite being of humanity. He is interested in transforming the humdrum surface events and in taking us aback with his liner personages. Normality is well and good for practical purposes, but beyond that, surely, is our life of hidden apprehension and suspense, with all its attendant joys and dangers. And yet instructive wisdom issues out of it all. Thus, the artist’s, as if, metallic images serve by withdrawing the viewer from the world of objects, and that for his charged responses to them. He brings his viewer up against the unpredictable itself and nothing humdrum. This enactment, even when in modest space, plays the drama of our ebullient or erratic souls. Those by whom such a ‘theatre’ of lovely specters is peopled, have as their task the search and prefigurement of the mysterious sitting right in the middle of our sometimes now too cozy T.V. fitted living rooms.
When the images of much of contemporary art become too self-regarding to the point where their sole obligation is to claim that they are no more nor less than what they are, as even also in the case of pure abstraction, then they are shut off from the seamless matrix of values and meanings which give them life. So they diminish their claim upon us, which ultimately negates the very conditions for their own survival. They have to pretend that it is not the condition of the human communication to involve intelligence, perception, conviction, memory and so on. But an image is not some sort of quasi absolute, rather it carries a burden of timeless meaning and so must, of necessity, stand in sound relationship to the strange but yet core truths of our deeper lives.
This artist’s, craft wise artistic mastery is undoubtedly characteristic in the realized perfection of his images. These indeed are a contribution to the art of our day. The contribution is an esthetic with a beating heart.
The comparative youth of the artist, all the more contributes to the energized nature of his visual language. His exploration of a kinetic territory is courageous and it has certainly yielded authentic results, which even as they offer us the necessary jolt, extend the duration of the missing mind. He makes no standard, or merely good gallery art. Along with a few others of his craft companions, he carries the living ghost of life right into the broad daylight of the present rather dry, desiccated times, thus enriching our kitty of the creative imagination.
Keshav Malik
