Artist
Between 2009 and 2011, Ray worked on a series of paintings, Landscape as Metaphor, that takes their cue from culturally embedded paradigms and distils them into an abstract language. Paintings like Raatri/Divaa (2011), Agni (2010), Prana (2010) and Monsoon (2010), are rendered through layers of color and impasto to metaphor the geological layers of the earth to manifest “genius loci” (or, spirit of place). The involved build-up of paint further suggests a relationship to the realm of natural, ancient and cosmic forces, derived at times from the artist’s local urban landscape of Mumbai and at other times from Sanskrit and Hindu mythology.
On the series, Landscape as Metaphor, Ray contemplates: “With its visual and sensory overloads, living in Mumbai is like one long electric shock. Through abstract painting, I want to express metaphorical worlds that uncover the experience of the city with its hyper energies, violently colliding and overlapping worlds and intense cacophonies of sounds, colors and shades. My paintings should describe Mumbai, with its textures, nuances and eccentricities, but abstractly not literally.”
The highly charged and expressive nature of Ray’s color palette and gestural style evokes the intensity, speed, violence and beauty of the city she has adopted as her own. She streaks, spills, splatters, pours and scrapes paint over the surface of the canvas. Areas of thick paint are applied as quickly as they are scooped off. Color is mixed with various tools directly onto the surface of the canvas and paint is moved around in a highly active and performing manner.
Eventually, the painting arrives at its conclusion through an exhaustive and emotive activity. “The beauty of the work may not be immediately apparent, and that’s because I am not trying to arrive at a logical conclusion,” Ray explains. “Painting is a highly emotive act to plumb the psychological depth of my own experience. The process is both the means and the end.” She concludes, “I want the painting to become something I never expected. The end result should always defy my expectations.”
After a 5 year hiatus from painting to focus on her arts management career, Ray returned to painting full-time in 2011. In January 2012, she had her debut solo exhibition in India at Galerie Mirchandani + Steinruecke, in Mumbai. The exhibition, Hidden Geographies (2012), opened to critical and commercial success, with a profile in Vogue India and reviews in TimeOut Mumbai, Bombay Times, Indian Express, and many others. India Today listed Ray as one of South Asia’s top five emerging Diaspora artists.
In Hidden Geographies, Ray goes beyond the Mumbai landscape. “Mumbai provided a starting-point to depart on other trajectories, landscapes and metaphors,” she offers. “The new paintings open up to art historical precedents of oil painting like Romanticism, Impressionism and Abstract Expressionism, but the language of color and patterning is firmly rooted in a non-Western tradition.” The multitude of Ray’s migrations and experiences pile-up on the surfaces of her canvases, a highly personal, lyrical agency informing each work to create a poetical narrative of submersion, pathos and desire.
Ray lives and works in Mumbai, with frequent jaunts to New York to scour cafés and museums.
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