Meena Chopra’s bold figurative work has self-assured certitude. But her abstract work is perhaps more interesting because it has a liminal quality. It’s a reflection of her tenuous, hesitant, self-conscious process of freeing herself of creative excrescences and finding her core as an artist.
In her latest series of paintings ‘Eyes of Time’ on display at Heritage Mississauga, Meena has attempted innovation and has experimented with digitalization, and in doing so she has abandoned the ponderous ruminations that have marked her earlier abstract work. This freedom has transformed her work and given it a numinous, mythical quality. In this series, Meena takes an untrodden artistic path by infusing her paintings with a touch of the mystique.
‘Eyes of Time’ is Meena’s boldest work technically. In its technique, it’s breathtakingly original. In her words, the paintings in the ‘Eye…’ series are “digitally manipulated…in some paintings I have used scanned images of my own artworks and then digitally combined them with some other images to make the final artwork. I have used different filters to get the right effects. These are then digitally printed on the canvas. To achieve a certain level of artistic satisfaction and to get the desired effects and results I used acrylic paint for the enhancement of the artwork.”
Meena has been experimenting with digitalisation since 2000, but this is her first exhibition of digital paintings. The layers and the hues that she has been able to achieve with her experimentation give the paintings a haunting quality. While the tangible manifestation is figurative – it’s the eye – all the paintings have innumerable layers of the intangible, often just interplay of light and shades. The different filters that Meena has used give each of the painting a distinct texture.
It was wonderful going through this. Thank you very much for writing this thorough and in-depth review. It is very helpful to understand your point of view from viewer's perspective.
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