Anuradha Nalapat is a multidisciplinary practitioner. A painter-philosopher. Her paintings have always suggested a need to address an immense ecosystem of Art. 

Whenever I look at the paintings by Anuradha, I experience the presence of a being that’s diffusing into the organismic searches. No tall claims, there is a silent interiority developing in her works. No spirituality that’s bottled within, but a generous expanse pervading inside out. She has by and large lived through a historic time that prioritized the mediumistic and disciplinary supremacy of painting and the genealogies of modernism. In her paintings one sights a struggle against literal, figurative and representational expressions. There is no settling into full-fledged abstraction either. A suspended lightness amidst the intricate network that she weaves. All along, her poetic non-conformist mind collaborates with science, literature and philosophy. Her paintings seem to be craving for ‘existential couplings’. They seem to challenge certain forms of indulgent ideas of Art, centred on a selfish male-centric ‘humanist’ sense.

‘The time is ripe and the stage set to nudge our gaze from the painting on the wall to its source- life. And let it remain there suspended. I am Art, not on a wall, not on a stand,’ she says in 2009. Nature wilfully seems to extend into her body.

Subtle linguistic ingredients and devices are part of her thought process. She writes on it herself in one of her notes on art. ‘A particular stroke, and you live the freedom of having lived half your life; the right colour and you have just awoken the unseen in you; an emerging shape, and you have just crossed a bridge; a black smudge on a sensitive painting, and you have crossed the finishing line! A gentle line could render you alone, and you know what they mean by ‘The flutter of a butterfly’s wing in this part of the world can create a storm in the other end of the world! Such is the insight offered through creation.’

I look at Anuradha as one who walked much ahead of her time, if not simply as a painter but as a philosopher evolving into a post-humanist time. Like a ‘Fire in the belly” (a title of one of her shows) her painterly journey seems to have long dreamt of a cyborg world that today totally changes the way we can imagine Art!

Dr Kavitha Balakrishnan  Artist  Poet  Historian 

Head Dept of Art History, College of Fine Arts, Thrissur