Missing Memories

Rahul Solanki paints with paper to conjure up minimalist abstractions

Rahul Solanki’s art coaxes you in phases.

Phase 1 – his paintings like the one I saw first, Missing, are placed like mug shots on a station wall, but with the unsteady hand of whimsy. This slight unraveling-in-motion catches one’s eye and adds an unexpected energy to his composition. You edge in closer to…

Phase 2 – his abstraction has a membrane-like delicacy. Sheer films file in to create translucent strokes. Featherlike touches reveals a delicate osmosis of shapes and with it, a narrative emerges.

Phase 3 – his surprising choice of medium – paper on canvas.

He says, “I look at the paper as my painting medium. I don’t find it restrictive rather it gives me infinite possibilities to experiment. I can use it as stroke, texture, colour, just like paint.” Rahul discovered paper during his days of experimentations. Acrylic, gouache, water or oil colours assimilate whereas he wanted each layer visible, even if in its fading shadows. He obsesses over paper’s benign transparency and its unwavering presence. Like footprints in the soft sand, each layer makes its presence felt, delicately conversing with the other, telling its unique story, alive in its co-existence.

MISSING

Artists have always been fascinated with the idea of memory. But the neurons that flood our brains with details, updates, reminders, conversations, all layering-up to the creation of tonnes and tonnes of memories is not how poets, writers, and artists describe memory. They like to filter it down to its pure emotion. So, the content of a memory is not really about its algorithm but about the meaningful notions between time and us. It is within the cross-sections of these collective memory-scapes that Missing was conceived.

Rahul Solanki while waiting to catch a ride home found a small passport size photograph on the road. Lying there still connected to its past yet orphaned from its bearer, missing all the key details. The image – small and quaint, was an embodiment of a life that Rahul knew nothing about. And in its nothingness existed the faint fragments of unfound familiarity. It got him thinking about his surroundings. Rahul saw the crowds that passed right by him, each passerby an embodiment of a life as full as his. Each one carrying a world of experiences, aspirations, ideas, thoughts, dreams. And in the intersection of all these invisible memories Rahul found his abstraction, poignant in its detailed complexity and yet lost in its quantum mass.

He used this context of memories and embellished it with abstract passport photo like portraits of the people he did not know, but had memories of. Layered with slivers of nostalgia he collaged foggy sketches of these recognisable strangers. He composed them as a representation of the missing links between collective memories. There is nothing sequential or logical about this euphoric web of intersecting memories. But within it lies the eternity of life.

Missing is an ongoing series of work and Rahul continues to document silhouettes of the missing memories that lie around him.