What Surface Remembers

In my practice, the surface functions as a living archive absorbing, sheltering, and revealing layered traces of time, memory, and lived experience. Each painting emerges as both an engagement with the external world and an inward, contemplative process shaped by urban flux and moments of quiet attention.

Surfaces in my work act as both site and subject. Growing up amid the historical layers of Gwalior and now living within Delhi’s continual transformation, I experience cities as palimpsests spaces marked by accumulation, erosion, and repair. This reality informs my process, which unfolds through instinctive layering, collage, drawing, and erasure. Forms are built and partially removed, allowing the surface to retain evidence of change rather than arrive at a fixed image.

Beyond materiality, the surface becomes a metaphor for emotional and spiritual memory. Each layer, incision, and fragment carries residues of both environment and inner state hesitation, resilience, reflection. Through slow, repetitive acts of making and unmaking, the painting absorbs these moments, holding what is often unseen or unspoken.

Urban disorder-fragmented walls, shifting structures, tangled systems enters my visual language, but within the studio this chaos is slowed and reconfigured. Painting becomes a meditative act, where turbulence gives way to attentiveness and surfaces begin to hold stillness.

Recent small works draw from a vivid memories of recurring images of vernacular architecture like heaps, ,painted grounds, and architectural outlines ,objects shaped by use, care, and necessity. Grids, checks, and woven textures echo textiles, floor plans, and layouts, hinting at the invisible systems that structure daily life. These patterned grounds evoke both domestic order and interconnectedness , asking how bodies, homes, and histories are held together by subtle, often overlooked rhythms. Simple, graceful forms become a kind of visual poetry Rather than depicting them directly, I allow these forms to fragment and dissolve within layered pictorial spaces. Their symbolic presence speaks quietly of sustenance, and connection.

Spatial ambiguity remains central. Forms hover, settle, or dissolve; lines guide without enclosing. Meaning is not prescribed but unfolds gradually, inviting viewers to navigate the work through their-own memory and perception.

Ultimately, my work explores how presence is registered on the fragile skin of a painting. What the surface remembers is never fixed it holds echoes rather than conclusions. I hope these works offer a space for slow looking, where memory, stillness, and the ordinary reveal their quiet depth.

These paintings invite slow looking. They offer a pause from urban haste .allowing memory, stillness, and the sacred to emerge within and embracing simplicity, the works affirm that true elegance lies not in excess, but in attention where the ordinary becomes a site of belonging and shared human truth.