Spiritual Fridays: What's your relationship with space?

Enclosed in a glass case hanging on the wall was a single white paper that had been given life–its thinly cut vertical strips seemed to run towards each other from the top and bottom in white harmony, like they were trying to bridge the visible gap. But it's not meant to portray peace, tells me its creator, artist Sachin Tekade, whose second solo exhibition themed 'Poetics of Space' is currently on at The Loft in Lower Parel.

This piece of his artwork, on the left wall, that caught my attention is actually supposed to depict his frustration and discomfort.  

“I come from Karodi, a village in Maharashtra, but I have been traveling all over post my schooling, I went to Akola for my Art Teacher's Diploma, then Baroda, then Mumbai and also travelled various places where my fellow classmates and friends live like Madhya Pradesh, Delhi, Assam etc... Some spaces in cities, like night clubs and malls that are very noisy irritate me. They make you feel ripped off your personal space; you have to abide by the unspoken rules of others, or the place.” In fact the gaps according to him, represent the break in harmony. But it’s not surprising that my interpretation is quite the opposite of his. His roots are in a small village, whereas I’ve been a city girl all my life, so while I do crave more open spaces, nature, less noise, less pollution and have a personal dislike for malls, it’s much easier for me to see harmony in the urban chaos. Just this difference in view points made me think about how adapting to our chock-a-block and attention-demanding surroundings, we Mumbaikers have possibly lost our sense of physical and mental space.

As we moved to the next piece, meant to depict more discomfort than the previous one, I realized that part of the trick to understanding his work the way he sees it is by peering at it from the sides, from where you’ll be able to catch the noise created by the interplay of the vertical white strips with the brown shadow they form under the glow of the gallery’s lights.

This surely looks more chaotic than the first one. Don't you think so too?

Even before he explained, I could tell that all the nine frames on the centre wall depict peace. These frames have horizontal strips flowing  from one edge of the paper to the other, from ahead and behind a verticle divider cutting the centre. Interestingly, the shadows (formed by this technique in these frames) seem to spread out in ripples and are visible from the front itself, you don't have to look for them from the side. “Here I’ve tried to recreate the vibes of places where I felt good, like Ajanta and Elora, where I keep on returning, Lotus temple in Delhi, and heritage sites. I am a deeply spiritual person. If you look closely you'll be able to feel the vibes too.”

Stare at this one, do you feel the vibes?

Well, they did have a slight psychedelic effect and with his style of crafting, his artworks breathe through spaces created in between by finely-sliced strips of paper. But he didn’t have a clear answer about what spirituality meant to him, except that it has to do with true spiritual knowledge and reality and that he believes in only one God, one spiritual power, Krishna. He believes in having a single focus, also his reason for using only one sheet of paper for each individual creation. So at first I thought he was using the word “spiritual” just as a gimmick, but further conversation–about how he feels about sharing his personal space with others–changed my perception, “While I love discussions with people, I prefer limiting it to a few people, I'm not too comfortable being around too many people. And there are a lot of feelings that I can’t express in words, but try to bring out through these minimalist works. I have worked on some of them even 50 times to express to my satisfaction. This exhibit captures what I've felt through all my travel journeys.”

Two on the right wall, with two frames of which the big one is about places where he feels neither too good, nor bad. They touched me the least and seemed the most uninteresting.

Finally we ended by doing a circle in the rectangular gallery space by returning to the left wall for a curious piece of his artwork (in the picture above), which unlike the others was not encased. “Sometimes some spaces evoke a response from you even if you don’t enter them. Their external beauty alone gives you a lot of pleasure.”

His artwork doesn’t stand out and doesn't make you swoon, but has the beauty of simplicity that makes you want to look and stay in the 'space' that he has created, that he has emoted through. What did I leave with? A lot of questions worth reflecting on, some of which struck me as soon as I'd read his theme's title Poetics of Space (inspired by the title of Gaston Bachelard's book), which pulled me to the gallery–How does space impact our lives? How does the lack of adequate physical space in cities influence our ideas of or need for mental space? How we are afraid of exploring new spaces and yet can never subdue our curiosity, which also explains our outer-space ambitions; how our subconscious picks up vibes and directs us about whom to let into our inner space and whom to keep out; and since time immemorial how artists, architects and more importantly visionaries have transformed spaces...

If you've delved into your own relationship with space and wish to share what you've unearthed, write to poojabhuladna@gmail.com