Image

Photo of a detail of a yellow and purple painting. You can see the aerial view of a figure with muscular arms standing on an edge and varying textures.

Aparna Sarkar

Dive

ABSTRACT

Bodies are slick, diaphanous, partial, chunky, Other—they vary in legibility, suspended in emergence and expulsion from the environment. Spaces are otherworldly, sticky with crusts and color tokens. The clogging of atmosphere with physical paint creates an exchange between figure and ground and rejects the Western aesthetic division between abstraction and figuration. As body and space collide, morph, and rub up against each other, they leave the residue of a queer, diasporic mythology. 

Image

Photo of an oil painting in reds, blues, and blacks. The top half of a figure in the bottom right with long arms stretches diagonally across the the painting to cup a small moon; hand grasp the figure's face.

Fire Starters

2021

65x48"

Oil on canvas

Multiple selves make these works. One asks sensorial questions of painting: what feelings, memories, and experiences can I transmit through color and material? I embed the smell of marigolds, the swift temperature change of the California desert, or the thick haze of a three a.m. dance floor make-out. My trusting self follows visions of color and shape, believing that they reveal my ancestry and life experience. At times I search for the painting through my body: I press, rub, and scratch, my actions becoming form-events. Still a fourth self renders and excavates the mythic bodily forms, made not born, who dive through, push, and hold up the paintings. 

Sun Diver

2021

85x60"

Oil on canvas

Image

Photo of an oil painting in yellows, browns, and lavenders. There's an aerial view of a figure with outstretched arms and a large, crusty spiral.

The diver form emerged from the inverted triangle of a built-up, cruddy drawing that I made during quarantine last spring. I wanted action, direction, and speed. I began thinking of divers as a digestion of painted bathers; my divers are in motion, active, muscular and gender-fluid. As I iterate this form, the dive becomes a site of projection–a metaphor and the thing itself. The idea of subject-in-process is part of my interest in diving and divers; the dive is the space between ground and abyss, stand and submergence, knowing and not-knowing. 

Image

Photo of a crusty oil painting in iridescent purple, pink, lime green, earth red, and orange. Abstracted bodies dive through a net of loops as if underwater.

Divers I

2021

60x72"

Oil on canvas

Divers II

2021

36x24"

Oil on canvas over panel

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Photo of an oil painting in desert warms and cools. Two abstracted diver forms slice through the picture plane; one has armpit hair. There are many moons and many surfaces.

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Photo of a small oil painting in primary colors. A figure with arms outstretched in a "T" at the bottom of the panel holds up the painting and faces a pool.

Pool Diver

2021

10x8"

Oil on panel


 

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Photo of two drawings in reds and blues of an inverted triangle that becomes the top half of a diver.

Diver Drawings, 2021

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Photo of four charcoal drawings on tan paper that are iterated from the form of the diver

Charcoal Drawings

2021

50x38"

Charcoal on paper

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Photo of three small, abstract oil paintings.

Tiny Paintings

2021

7x5"

Oil on panel

Paint Drawings

2021

15x11"

Acrylic, gouache, and crayon on paper

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Photo of a painting in which one figure holds another, maybe lying down, and the space dances with underpainting glow.

Being Held

2021

20x16"

Oil on canvas