Priya
Suneel graduated from the University of Madras, attaining a Degree in Fine Arts
with Distinction and the Government of India Merit Scholarship. Priya has been
exhibiting her work since 1982. She has shown with the Society of Women Artists
in their annual exhibition at the Mall Galleries in Trafalgar Square. Her
work was shown as part of the Patchings Festival winners display Exhibition at
Nottinghamshire and with the Society of Nigerian Artists at their annual
exhibitions in Nigeria. Her practice incorporates painting, mixed media, and
drawing with inroads into three dimensional works and is infused with
the world cultures of London, India, Nepal and Nigeria where she has lived and
worked.
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| Artist: Priya Suneel |
Priya
says that one of the reasons she makes collages is because the process
reinvigorates or redirects her painting process. She studies the structure, palettes
or the colors in the architecture, landscape, interior or the clothing and
flesh of the model before her eyes, and searches for ways to depict them
through placement of shaped bits. She captures the essences of these palettes
by generating color fields or sensations entirely through juxtaposition of textile fabric, acrylic skins,
paper or found objects. These collages are masterful displays of the cumulative
effects of color. Priya focuses on the play of light and shadow across bare
flesh, the ways in which skin tones are constructed, and the way volumes and
planes come into being entirely through juxtaposition of colors. As the viewer takes
in the work a sort of subliminal blending takes place because each bit of the
textured material remains physically autonomous on the actual surface of the
artwork, but we experience a flowing interrelationship of parts because of Priya’s
profound understanding of color. Neighboring snippets of the found objects
blend to form a unified field of color when the collage is seen from a distance
or through squinting eyes.
In
The
Emergence, Priya creates bust of papier-mâché, wire and textile the
artist describes shadowy concavities, fleshy highlights on rounded face, bone
and muscle structure, suggestively the lovely tan and olive subtleties of flesh
tones, with tiny, straight edged, triangular and rectangular snippets of fabric. The manner of the collages is meticulously
self-effacing, allowing shifts in value and color to overshadow materials and
process. Indeed, color is her true gift. Sophisticated modulations of closely
valued tones make for rich and spacious pictures. In Tulips in a Pitcher, Priya offsets and enlivens a virtually
monochromatic image with a range of yellows, greens, pinks and blues. It is, in
its own quiet way, a bravura performance.
In
the collages of landscapes such as Red
Fox and Townhouse Chelsea, the sides and roofs of
houses, the horizon line, the foreground and background, the earthbound natural
and inorganic structures, and the deep space of sky, are flattened out. Priya
does not flatten out three dimensional forms and present a surround view of them
in a systematic way. Everything doesn’t add up. She chooses graphically
striking indicators of particular objects and rhythmically locks them together,
without relinquishing the sense of place portraying light and atmosphere. These
collages explore the primary formal strengths of color. Depending on the tone,
light and shadow are richly depicted; light wending its way through a landscape
or still life. The collage elements play dual roles. They are formal elements
in a strong flat array of balanced colors, and they also suggest three
dimensionality. In the background planes, walls, or earth and sky are broken up
into interlocking pieces, which push elements forward, the human figure, the
house, still life objects. The tactile process entailed in this vacillation of
compositional elements energizes these surfaces.
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| 'Tulips in a Pitcher', mixed media collage on canvas, 44x54cms, Priya Suneel |
In Street
in Jodhpur the
collage elements are centered, surrounded by blank space that also punctures
the cluster of shapes. Certainly the individual parts add up to a particular
place, but they are not as tightly interlocked or grounded in space. These free
floating descriptive signs make us see a scooter, fence, trees, but they gently
coalesce and resist being tightly interlocked, simultaneously. These
shapes when combined with smaller shapes within the original large shape become distinct
shapes. So you may have a shape that may be partly in the prominent and partly
in the supporting.
There is often one prominent shape in the composition that the eye goes to first and then
travels on from there. You want to find a shape in the house, but not the whole house, and a
shape in the tree, but not the whole tree, that together forms a larger more
complex shape that the viewer sees first, before they see the house and tree.
After that, more slowly,
they will see this shape within the larger shape is part of a house and this is
part of a tree. You are
making the viewer read the painting, slowing down their looking.
The Biomes, Eden Project,
Cornwall, one of the fascinating works in the
exhibition, is a perfect example of the ways in which Priya can create complex
color sensations using a minimal amount of colored pieces of paper that have
been carefully cut in order to maintain the visual flow of the figure. The
shadows and highlights and voluptuous folds in the structure are depicted with grey,
brown and liver colored bits of paper. In fact the work was created live, au
plein aire, during the televised recording of "Landscape Artist of the
Year 2022" and was telecast nationally on Sky Arts (Sky TV Network). Priya
was one of the privileged artists selected to participate as pod artist in the
national telecast programme. Priya gets into the expressive essence of complex
tonal ranges and under painting as she reconstructs the emotional content of
the shapes and colors. Her path as an artist has been characterized by
strikingly fresh work noted for its clarity and sensitivity thus defining Red Sky Blue Earth.
Abhijeet
Gondkar
(Abhijeet
Gondkar is an independent writer and curator based in Mumbai)
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Priya Suneel
Red Sky Blue Earth
Mixed-Meadia Collages, 28th
August to 3rd September 2023
Jehangir Art Gallery, Kala Ghoda, Mumbai – 400 001, Between 11 am and 7 pm daily
