Kaveri Raina (b. 1990, New Delhi, India) lives and works in New York. Raina’s acrylic, graphite and oil pastel paintings on burlap suggest the corporality of a memory, both witnessed and imagined. Abstracted forms rendered from personal experience and inherited histories reveal generations of dislocation. Bodies at rest or in motion oscillate across textured surfaces, interrupted and reimagined mid-story.
Densely painted shapes and vigorous swirls of graphite are pulled inwards by their weight in thickness and color. Working from both sides of the burlap’s surface, Raina pushes and pours acrylic through the permeable weave with a rhythmic physicality. Graphite and oil pastel are applied with fervor, forming vortices of promenading ants, spiraling and marching in unison. Burlap weaves of varying rigidity are sewn together, stretched, and often threaded into multiple panels. Shadows appear in layers, echoing the artist’s movements in form and ground. The grit of its structure is bolstered by a deep and unexpected palette, evoking an equivalent response in its reading.
The immediacy in Raina’s application of medium is evidence of an innate response to a concrete narrative, providing new life to a female-dominated script. At its inception, Raina links historic points of reference to her cultural beginnings; at its fruition, a collection of fragmented chronicles rise to the surface, framing her own somatic memory within moveable landscapes. Raina interprets the tragic aftermaths of iconic and unsung heroines in India’s colonial and contemporary history. Displaced from these events and looking in from the outside, Raina considers these narratives from her perspective with an inherent connection to these women and their stories.
Raina continues this narrative thread in her works on paper, adding to the collection of ceremonial and battle scenes while contemplating the boxes bodies rest within. Frenzies of line and gesture are rendered in graphite and oil pastel against an architectural grid that resembles the geometry of her burlap substrates. Corporal forms are confined within these vessels, peaking through the folds of a flesh-like surface. Their disjointed nature obscures a direct reading and unearths an internal narrative that reveals itself over time. The viewer becomes a witness to the unfolding events on the canvas, willed to participate in a complex plot.