Tuesday, December 30, 2008

Hard Wired/Hot Wired
Anish Kapoor’s Raw Voltage
Works on Paper 2007/Gladstone Gallery/NYC


Anish Kapoor’s ‘Works on Paper’ exhibition now at NYC’s Gladstone Gallery is a display of several similar and incandescent, deeply colored images…not your crayola box of primary colors, these are primal, sacred color…red, electric blue, black, purple, paste white…dense and reminiscent of Holi celebrations or Hindu puja. This is saturated color seen behind the closed eye, posited in the mind’s interior. The pieces are done in gouche which provides for a rich, powdery and sensuous depth of surface. Small but nevertheless potent the paintings create a tangible vortex and the way into a charged construct that knows no boundary. Each painting is a meditation of connection and nexus whether it be a sprouting, tuberous, vegetal form, luminescent egg, slippery knot of blood, or wired neuron.

Electric, charged…the paintings are hard wired, hot wired…ancient, cosmic force fields…rooted in earth or spinning in space…crackling raw voltage or heavy earth bound sprouting forms…

Anish Kapoor’s work is a feed on energy…potent, primal vitality at the heart of the world or the source of the universe…the nerve like tendrils reach and turn, grasp and flex, vibrate and rattle our retina. They mesmerize and expand vision by providing a sink hole for unrestrained consciousness…

FYI, the following is a previous article on Anish Kapoor…

Witness Anish Kapoor ‘s 2005 folly (as in architectural structure) for World of Interior’s magazine ‘projects’ in the snow. It doesn’t just evoke, it IS, it relays a Tantric fervor…his newest piece is a teardrop, the back of a whale, a vermilion tikka – packed snow covered in a thick, red powder skin, a dense opaque membrane…it melts, a pool of dye, a transient puja, celebrated then gone…his work carries all the power and might of Mohenjo Daro…it is infinite, a womb with the bouyancy of water, a mysterious blend of clean, coherent modernism combined with the deep, ancient proportions of Hindu iconography…Now, look at the Bean in Chicago…heavy – the surface curves like the slow movement of an anaconda – full and voluptuous but rigorous and devoted to the energy of solid weighted matter. Here is no rising Mozartian filigree, no emotion, sweet temperament or Baroque frenzy – instead – the skin is not about to burst but glides, dense, compacted, a powerful dose of the universe compacted then reflected with the contained energy of a meteor. Mined from a deep vein of potent, universal prajna/energy…they are both pieces, seeds incarnate, energy unsprouted, totally not inert but hovering constructs of deep, contained vitality.

Stephanie Bell Behnke

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