by Every painting in Arpita Singh’s debut in Great Britain feels like a desperate attempt to understand a turbulent past and to remember the endless turbulence of life, politics and history. Singh, born in 1937, matured as an artist in a time of huge social upheaval in India. In the midst of countries of national emergency, rising international tensions and nuclear tests, the art that came from India after 1975 – Brilliant in the exhibition of the imaginary institution of India in Barbican last year – to a way to document, resist and survival.
But Singh’s work is not extremely literally or particularly angry. Instead, their intense, colorful figurative paintings feel like a look at inner life, emotions and trauma in times of fighting. They are extremely complex, infinitely layered and full of historical allusions, military symbolism and daily life. The paintings are stacked vertically with pictures – not like a traditional western landscape painting, but with several ideas on and over the screen. You almost never see one thing, a scene, but several pictures that are knitted together. It is a part-comic book, part-chagall-dreamscape, part-folk art.
In an early painting, a woman tends to her garden when mother her child. People drive past cars, a child looks around a curtain and a figure sleeps while jets fly over us. Perspectives do not make sense and image planes, but everything merges into a beautiful world of blue, a portrait of female care and tenderness in the hectic hectic pace of urbanity.
This struggle between inner life and sociopolitical reality plays here in the best works. A couple takes tea in front of a salute soldier, a woman-like woman with more armed pottery fights a bureaucrat with a weapon while he was bent on a sleeping man. Wherever you are looking for, there are the same pictures that are repeatedly repeated as he pushes back: flowers, cars, soldiers, bureaucrats in black, impending men and countless women.
The women are important here because in a world that otherwise chaos and violence is light, maintain, maintain and make them available. This comes out most clearly in watercolors from the 1990s: psychedelic visions of motherhood and femininity, which are wonderfully tender and vulnerable. And although the larger paintings are the stars of the show until about 2002, the works on paper are great, clearer and more concise than the pictures, but still full of Singh’s trademark.
Working from the past 20 years has followed a collage-like approach and create large, stained canvases that are plastered with words, human figures and stripes of collapsing colors. There are indications of war, conflicts, shifting, allusions to Indian epentes-sie are interesting paintings, but most of them are only stained, half-abstract and incoherent and do not convey their ideas or aesthetics as well as the earlier parts. Although they are not great, this may make sense with the topic of the show. Perhaps it reflects how your memory and splinters struggle with an increasing eye in her mind, how pictures are increasingly trying.
There is a lot here that passes through the heads of a non-Indian audience, and a lot is largely unexplained. There are only so many references to folk art, Indian court painting and current events that are no longer as topical. If you try to find out everything, feel a little insane. But Singh wants the audience to take the work to the nominal value and interpret them for themselves. So what you left is a beautiful chaos of memory, a vision of life in which the political, personal, social and domestic past merge into a great past. Do we remember, don’t we? Everything confused and hopefully in the end pretty nice.
• Arpita Singh: The memory is in the serpentine North Gallery, London until July 27th.
