Sarika Mehta's journey parallels her apprenticeship as a printmaker and her gradual shift to painting. When juxtaposed, the prints and the paintings limn two opposing creative energies. The prints are a study in sombre gravitas, where the heaviness of ink and other pigments holds the paper down. The paintings on the other hand are conduits of lightness. Colour transitions are also integral to the arc; they reveal that the initial predominance of slate greys and blacks has been checked by the luminous congress of warm shades.

In Mehta's work, one could read an elegy to Alexander Calder's chime-like wiry mobiles. It is almost as though a rascal wind had cut through and unravelled Calder's sculptures and the disarticulated birds, homes, reeds and flowers, had descended into Mehta's work. Devoid of their giddying motion, these objects are entrenched in a terra firma that is no less rich than flesh.

As the earth crumbles and makes way for flesh, the wistfully compact strokes, which populate most of the canvases, adopt the mantle of emoticons. They could be perceived as a continuation of Mehta's already established streak of engagement with nature, in that they could easily be recognised as blades of grass. But I would like to propose that we identify them as deracinated hairs or bristling hairs, standing on edge. These objects/subjects necessarily lose their sharp-edged identities and voices when they enter the atmosphere of Mehta's pictorial realm, although their staunchly metaphysical temperament often startles.

Born 1980 in Ahmedabad
Diploma in Painting, C.N. College of Fine Arts, Ahmedabad
Post-Diploma in Graphics, Faculty of Fine Arts, M.S. University, Baroda
Lives in Ahmedabad