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May 3, 2018 – Feature
Goutam Ghosh’s “Morph, blend and flatten (space) of Bird, Reptiles and Flower”
Milena Hoegsberg
Religion, magic, art, physics, and mathematics blend in Goutam Ghosh’s solo exhibition “Morph, blend and flatten (space) of Bird, Reptiles and Flower.” The delicate, sometimes dreamlike paintings gain energy from the friction between ideas from different disciplines and systems of thought as they come into contact. Ghosh draws on conversations with Indian scholar Kaustubh Das about tantra and its understanding of consciousness as a source for both his thinking and making. “Tantra,” Sanskrit for loom, weaves together complex concepts and practices. In the tradition of sacred art, tantra drawings and paintings of abstract geometric shapes were used as meditative tools to awaken heightened states of embodied consciousness. Tantra is of interest to Ghosh because it is a phenomenological tradition that validates knowledge resulting from direct experience which would be difficult to empirically account for, like the movement of energy or time. Yet, his paintings also show an awareness of the human process of cognition and its reliance on quantifiable data or pattern. The mind wants to recognize and categorize, to find a pattern.
Paintings like Untitled (all works 2018), Glycerin, and Tennis Ball exhibit a subjective pattern, while they bring up references to systems of order and logic. All three paintings …