The exploration of Kumar Vaidya’s practice requires that we maneuver through his artistic practice by acknowledging the fixed ways we perceive and construct art history. From that point on what does an attempt to situate his work (or relocate from) re-imagined art histories entail? Often times, the basis of analysis, critique and extrapolation rests heavily on the validation of a practice by associating it to a chronological, and thereby a monolith art historicity. While this has been challenged and confronted when looking at a body/bodies of work within an artists practice, art history itself remains largely a binary. It is essentially a ‘rooted’ [1] set of annotations. And so what it beckons is a re-imagination. Art history, must be seen as malleable, floating and as a set of relations between the visible and the invisible narrative. The invisible here might never be discovered and the visible might be a re-articulation of what has already occurred in the past. And yet it is this ambiguity, this nature of ideas and stories and moments that can float and find associations in a rhizomatic [2] way, that will lend a more nuanced look at Vaidya’s practice. One must also note here that Vaidya’s practice evokes a visual and formal aesthetic that tends to elicit very obvious ways of being seen and consumed by the ‘audience’ as well as by the artist himself.

Kumar Vaidya born in 1964, studied at the Sir J J School of Art, Mumbai before training at the Nationale Superieure des Beaux-Arts de Paris on a French government scholarship in 1993. In his early canvases from the 1980’s, Kumar Vaidya covers the surface with strokes of color in a free wheeling gesture. The paints are smudged, layered, and in parts, seemingly scratched from the surface. Undulating forms and pockets of erasure and addition dominate the formal aesthetic. In these early works a certain familiarity exists – perhaps from the dominance of a certain way of seeing located in a school of thought within ‘Abstraction’ in the context of Indian modernist art histories. What is interesting is that given a lack of engagement with the artists work in a critical lens, this familiarity is a bias on part of the viewer. Either trained to look through the critics lens whose ‘eye’ shifts through many chronologies in a discipline or genre, or from the gaze of a viewer who has invariably been conditioned to find certain associations given that ‘abstraction’ is now a framework ubiquitous outside of academia; names like S H Raza, thanks to the dominance of a market-centric visibility, invoke immediate associations and comparisons of artists that have a similar formal language.

Kumar Vaidya, Untitled, Oil on Canvas, c.1980’s, Image courtesy the artist.

Vaidya’s work however in the 90’s and 2000’s evolves into two trajectories – one where he worked on architectural surfaces – covering entire walls of office spaces and homes while the other was the large-scale two-dimensional canvas. In his more ambitious architectural paintings, Vaidya takes on a performative role – every gesture and application of paint is thought out and yet, simultaneously evokes the fluidity reminiscent in his early canvases. In perhaps Richter like notions of the erasure or ‘blur’ as something that “makes all the parts a closer fit”, Vaidya‘s is a long, deliberate process that is captured in a rare video accessed from the archive of the artist. Paint is applied and removed in strokes that are deliberate in order to produce lines and angles that belie the number of layers on the surface. An illusion occurs, where the viewer can’t easily discern the top coating from the very first, thereby referencing an illusion reminiscent of the principles of perspective coupled with the language that was the pre-occupation of movements such as op-art. Vaidya in essence takes from art histories, not necessarily privileging one over the other, and does something more with it – something that is more visceral in the experience of the work rather than just engaging with it at a formal aesthetic level. This process finds its way into large scale canvases as well. While the dimensions are more constricted, the method and process still remain the same. Paintings move from mural-like to one that is more textural.

Kumar Vaidya, Untitled, Oil on Canvas, c.1980’s, Image courtesy the artist.

Artist Kumar Vaidya working on site, undated image from the artist’s personal archive.