Busy Mind Print

India. Deep in the resonance of an inward journey Pritam Bhatty grapples with the paradoxes that crowd her life. Her painterly quest enters subliminal dimensions where the unreal strongly tilts into the real unleashing a stream of memories, events, fantasies, hallucinations and magical transformations. The fragility and strength of these shifting perspectives metamorphose the psyche and inundate Pritams creative matrix. Her painterly eye tracks these transformations within the inner and outer layers of her being. Working in water colours, charcoal and pencil Pritam captures the epiphany of the fleeting images that surface within her.In her present body of work her larger aquarelles are energized by an amorphous, enigmatic quality. In several compositions her protagonists seem to be suspended between being and nothingness as they struggle to achieve meaning and equilibrium. Objects and persona are placed within shifting colour fields that grow out of layered, stained grounds. Monumental figures occupy the central spaces in several paintings. Compositionally Pritam manipulates a complex grid of overlaid images that hold the narrative thread that binds her quasi-abstract work. Water colour with its willful elusiveness is a medium that suits her best as it offers her the possibility of creating notations of tentative images as well as the rootedness of some representational elements that she positions in her work.The void and its primordial stillness provide an expansive abstract hinter ground in Pritam Bhattys work over which her protagonists play and move. Poured and stained pigment and fine colour washes, blotted, scrubbed and erased tonal quotients permeate and define the layered colour matrix of her aquarelles. Quirky and whimsical elements such as bone cages and grids appear randomly in them as in Dawn of Being, Caged Bird Song and Under the Rose for instance. They symbolize rebirth and beginnings as the titles suggest. The bones which are rendered with great refinement and delicacy, have a double edged symbolism of supporting life and signaling death. This duality of the ending and beginning of cycles permeates much of Pritams compositions adding a note of menace to the overall serenity. In them there is a moody melancholic distancing, a sense of waiting and watching the time warp of life that haunts us. In this body of work Pritam embarks on a well deliberated cathartic voyage of terminations that in turn engender possibilities of growth.