Sheetal Gattani: “Beneath the Surface” at Aicon

Gattani, Sheetal, Untitled Shadowed Continuum, 3x3 feet

BY SIBA KUMAR DAS, March 2, 2025

Whenever Sheetal Gattani changed studios, her art changed. She began making small drawings and paintings just after college when, in her family home in Mumbai, India, she shared a room with her sister. During these ten years, her artworks were dark in palette. Then, when she moved to her first studio, a light-filled space, the size of her works grew and her colors changed. Her palette ceased to be dark but it didn’t entirely lighten. Also, the stronger and sharper the light the more subtle her hues became.

Gattani changed studios three times before settling on her own permanent space, where she has made art for the last 18 years. About a year ago, owing to major repairs in her building, her windows boarded up, she lost the natural light in which she had worked. Forced to improvise, she installed focus lights commonly used in photography. The resulting illumination not spreading evenly over her canvases, she shifted to small white paper works which featured color but sparingly. Some of these essentially white-on-white works are in Beneath the Surface, the Aicon show (January 30-March 8, 2025) which this essay discusses.

From Gattani’s experience with studios, two conclusions are possible. First, in the extremely strong light of Mumbai’s summers Gattani gravitates towards darker multi-hued colors, while during the grey monsoon season, she applies lighter colors, especially white. Secondly, the role light plays in her art is so critical she thinks of light not so much as an atmospheric or environmental variable but as an artistic medium in its own right, especially because sharp light helps her see nuances in color hues.

Beneath the Surface showcases 14 paintings, including three diptychs, and 16 drawings. Eight of these drawings form an untitled series identified as “Lines of Continuity.” Though Gattani doesn’t see her drawings as more primary than her paintings, she recognizes that in the artworld, drawing is generally seen as the primary means of artistic expression. Yet Gattani’s oeuvre suggests that she has a strong point, which will be discussed below. Meanwhile, let’s start our journey through Beneath the Surface by taking a long, contemplative look at the drawing “Lines of Continuity V.”

In making this drawing, Gattani applied many layers of charcoal and dry pastel on paper and then, employing a sgraffito-like technique, removed material from the paper’s surface, producing a weathered evocative look that may remind you of stonewall surfaces that have decayed or grown old over many years. You may also think of the patinas and irregular textures you see on the surfaces of Japanese raku-ware pottery. If you ask Gattani what her goal was, she’ll say she was not deliberately alluding to past experience or pre-existing things in the world but rather exploring the square space before her going with the flow, her task actuated by the attainment of formlessness, an aesthetic aim she says drives all her art.

The drawing consists of three horizontal sections, each clothed in a different shade of grey, the middle band more white than grey. The bands at the top and the bottom speak of time past and decay, evoking loss and longing---the top band more than the one at the bottom since it discloses on a layer beneath the surface black and grey lines that seemingly suggest something symbolic, a glimpse of a past culture. That said, the bottom band is also semiotically significant. Its color is akin to Payne’s grey, a blue-black grey close to the color of a pigeon’s plumage---a grey lending itself to creating atmospheric perspective.[i] Gattani’s colorations and excavations impart to the drawing shadows and dim half-lit areas that transport the viewer to light and luminosity. It is here that the band in the middle comes into its own---an irregular, foggy, cosmic river of light. Gattani’s alchemy is such, it is through her search of formlessness that she gives us a deep silence and stillness. She makes you think of an artist who too sought formlessness and a sublime transcendental effect, the great modernist Agnes Martin, whom Gattani admires.

Gattani, Sheetal, Untitled Light Unfolding, 5x10 feet, All images courtesy of Aicon and Sheetal Gattani. 
 

The largest painting in the show---“Untitled (Light Unfolding)” ---yields its riches but slowly. Gattani has layered her canvas myriad times creating a highly textured surface comprising many shades and tones of yellow. She has removed or reduced color in patches, and additionally by dappling the surface further through smudges she has released a weathered look. Also, within an overall rectangular structure, she has combined rectangles of irregular size. She has moreover positioned the rectangles at different heights relative to the painting’s backing, creating thereby a sculptured three-dimensionality---one that creates in the painting evocative shadows. To achieve this effect, the artist took the bold step of cutting the painting’s canvas to enable carpentry-mounted segments. Gattani remains in search of formlessness, a reductionist, even as she creates “a shifting interplay of light, shadow, and form.”[ii] When you reflect on her achievement, you think of Japanese aesthetics. Another modernist great whom the artist admires is Ad Reinhardt, who took reductionism to an extreme but paradoxically induced the viewer to concentrate ever more deeply. Like Agnes Martin, who was his friend, Reinhardt absorbed influences from Japanese and other Asian philosophies, including Vedanta. Give to “Light Unfolding” the same focus and contemplation as Martin and Reinhardt summon, and you will be transported.

Do the same, please, with the paintings “Untitled (Depths Unspoken)” and “Untitled (Shadowed Continuum).” With their interiority-producing application of color---respectively incarnating shades of blue and red---they show us even more than “Light Unfolding” Gattani’s success in employing modulation to create a meditative space that absorbs you completely. Also highlighted is Gattani’s skillful and innovative approach to the paintings’ materiality, a virtuosity she acquired through long practice and experimentation. We noted above the canvas cutting that facilitated the artful positioning of an artwork’s components. Ponder now the effect of the dramatic carpentry that Gattani employed in “Shadowed Continuum” to trigger on the painting’s surface a wondrous shadowing.

Gattani was a friend of the great Indian abstractionist Mehlii Gobhai, who died in 2018 and whom she regarded as a soul-brother. He was both an extraordinary colorist and an inventive exploiter of materiality. Their friendship and professional interaction contributed to her articulation of her artistic practice.

Gattani believes that her paintings and drawings are equally primary. While the two differ in terms of materials and mediums, it is the same vision and the same thinking on materiality that animate both. If you reread the previous paragraphs addressing three paintings and a drawing, you’ll surely agree. By eroding the distinction between drawing and painting, Gattani is extending the boundaries of both.

In 2017, the Morgan Library and Museum organized the exhibition Drawn to Greatness: Master Drawings from the Thaw Collection. In a catalog essay accompanying the show, Jay A. Clarke of the Art Institute of Chicago said that “the formal semiotics of drawing are ripe to be explored in new ways.” In Gattani’s art, such exploration will surely find a fertile source of ideas. WM