Set across shifting timelines, figures in Pooja’s paintings, appear trapped in space and spaces, within the confines of a house and the weight of their own atmosphere. They are either illuminated or shadowed, recessed or pushed to a side—positioned at the subliminal thresholds of doorway, or seated beside window. Stepping into her imagery, you begin to realize that nothing follows the continuum of the everyday.
Drawing from the social sphere, the recurring characters in Pooja’s paintings are her family members, relatives, strangers—all based on images from the photo album and everyday snapshots. Through thin layers of paints, gentle highlights, and subdued yet contrasting palette Pooja’s painterly language merges and reveals, elaborates and obscures, alleviates and unsettles, as if poised between ‘dexterity’ and ‘ambiguity.’ While attuned to metaphor, her work carries an air of enigma around distinct figures, placed within sparse and evacuated rooms, inviting us to grasp, if at all, the mind is an end in itself. In doing so, her approach to painting hovers between the formal and the abstract, keeping viewers teetering on the cusp of speculation. There is a sense of considerate detailing across the picture plane, a perspectival interplay that lends her work a layered complexity, opening portals for characters to slip into eccentricity, with a subversive intent. Her paintings capture a cast of characters often linked by light, doors and windows, which, in turn, become quiet protagonists.
This series of work conjure the complexity of personal and social dynamics in contemporary life, while winding through the intricacies of human psyche and conscience. Riddles, then are posed through composed appearances: in (un)familial rituals and routines, paired scenes, blurring inside-out spaces, in shadow and beneath flashlight. They are along timelines stretching from the past to future and linking history with the present. As we are led through her quiet protagonists, Pooja’s methodical gestures resist easy legibility, like a refusal to filling in the chasm — slowly inhabiting our mind.
