Critical Appraisal of "The Ground Realities of Dreaming"

Laila Khan Rajpal's paintings reflect a constant process of rejection and assimilation. Things come in, are digested and go out. Her early waywardness with forms, colours, textures and even frames is no longer there.

 

Old symbols like the rose are dissolved in streams of colour. A red butterfly takes its place. The familiar figures of nude men and women are still there, but as forms emerging out of the motion of brush strokes on board or canvas. They sometimes have the fragile appearance of figures in dreams and shadows that dissolve if you try to touch them. There is a certain fragility here that reflects one of her ongoing concerns.

 

In her new phase of work her colours still explore nuances of brown invaded by blue or red. I wonder if this scheme represents earth, water and fire or the male and female principles, the blue and the red respectively playing out the process of creation in nature?

 

The artist implies as much when she describes her female principles "as the symbol of creation and of love, union and transience." This drama of life is played out in an erotically charged dream world, where our senses enter as butterflies: here for a moment and gone again.

 

The focus of her work now is on changes and movement, some of it bursting out of the figures themselves, but essentially inherent in brush strokes and flashes of colour. This is as it should be in art.

 

The ultimate reality of a painting is in itself. The way in which colours blend or confront each other; the way pigments create three-dimensional maps for the eyes to follow; and the harmony that tells you more than the sum of its components, give a work of art its special quality. Laila is slowly moving towards this direction.

 

It is the reality of this space that makes her artistic statements valid. They are honest, straight forward and lacking in decoration.

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The truth is always naked, clad only in its own shadow, like her nudes. But that is only one aspect of her work. This time a number of her paintings have acquired a delicate sense of movement as in her portraits with the hair flying across the face. It is her quest to portray the fragile and transitory in a new and more lively mode. When one feels an artists work has become more lively one knows the artist is on firm ground. This latest set of works gives one precisely that feeling.

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Suneet Chopra

Art Critic & writer