"Macchiwali" Painting

Artist Norbert Gonsalves’s work reflects a distinctly diasporic consciousness. Having moved to North America at age 29, his vivid, large-scale, mixed media works on canvas are still very much anchored to his Indian homeland and tribe. The rich, cross-cultural philosophy that shines through in his work is layered and ridden with moral and philosophical tensions. East and West, tradition and modernity, the material and the spiritual straddle twin poles in his dynamic compositions. Indian aesthetic sensibility – its rich heritage spanning folk and classical art – lingers in his painterly rhythm. His work offers a conflation of painting and drawing, realism and abstraction, with found objects such as fabric incorporated for texture and density. Determined to meander in and out of two culture systems of variably conflicting values, in his work Gonsalves applies a visual language to the disparate perspectives latent in his practice and process. Keen to make sense of the sexism and the violence against women, occurring in his homeland and across the globe. that he now must witness from a virtual distance, his works often play with motifs one can liken to creation and destruction. Shifting with ease between abstract and representational registers, his works throw fire and slip across borderlands. Scorching flames, smoke, tares, spills and splashes crowd his canvases like psychological scars. Images are forced into grids, chopped and cut, trimmed and yanked as if the artist were enacting a type of symbolic violence with his subject matter.