Past Forward - Recent Oil on Canvas

When viewing an exhibition of recent work by a young artist, one might legitimately expect evidence of a new turn, experiment or direction. However, one brings a very different expectation to the viewing of recent work by an artist such as Akbar Padamsee, whose magisterial practice covers more than six decades. Here, one does not look for the trace of the new; rather, one retraces the mysterious processes of renewal that continue to propel and inspire an artistic quest.

Akbar Padamsee’s practice is based primarily on a meticulous re-visiting of three genres: the nude, the head and the landscape. This revisiting is a recursive, additive, dynamic process; when I ask Padamsee how he views the concept of repetition in relation to his art, he replies: “It is change of the kind that does not abolish everything that went before.” The artist’s chosen genres are not closed formulae so much as they are inexhaustible tropes that deal with the notions of the seemingly at-hand but in fact always out-of-reach body, the enigmatic presence of the Other, and the urgent proximity yet terrifying distance and unknowability of nature.

Repetition is, in any case, a complex gesture. As Deleuze argues, it is necessarily an enrichment, a recursion, an occasion for making choices in approaching or representing the object or objective that was the focus of the first attempt; every repetition marks a further unfolding of that which one is in quest of. Accordingly, while a banal common sense account may suggest that repetition is the deliberate negation of difference, the opposite is true: the energy of repetition lies in its constant production and calibration of difference.