Field Notes (On the Afterlife of Trees), the debut solo exhibition of emerging artist Vishal Kumar Gupta, presents a significant body of oil paintings, watercolour drawings, and graphite works — a practice shaped through accumulation, fragmentation, and sustained acts of looking.
Gupta engages with the natural world in expressive, painterly explorations of twigs, branches, and tree stumps. Often dismissed as incidental, these objects reappear as monumental gestures — not as motifs, but as active witnesses to memory and time. For Gupta, the found object carries an intimate resonance. On the one hand, discarded wood speaks of decay; on the other, it suggests continuity shaped by absence. His attentiveness to nature took root during his years at Kala Bhavana, Santiniketan, continuing into his Master’s studies in Baroda, where photography complemented a practice of observation, drawing, and collection. The beginning of a work is not a mark on paper or canvas, but the insistence of a presence that commands attention. In the studio, a single branch resting on the floor can shape the work long before the first brushstroke, extending the field beyond landscape into the artist’s personal space as an iterative record of encounter.
In this way, fragmentation becomes central to this practice. Rather than offering unified or resolved images, Gupta allows partial gestures, interruptions, and shifts in density to dictate how he approaches his work and the formats it assumes. A single idea explored across multiple frames functions as charged units — self-contained yet relational — carrying ambiguity while inviting speculation. While singular works can be apprehended as wholes, understanding unfolds in shifts of attention, return, and pause. Elements coexist, allowing the viewer to move freely across marks and textures. This condition resonates with a broader understanding of the subject in flux. Drawing, in particular, becomes a means of negotiating this durational state, accommodating abandon as well as restraint.
Gupta’s artistic language hovers between abstraction and corporeality. Gesture unfolds as a negotiation, shaped as much by the behaviour of materials as by the artist’s hand. Thick impasto oil paints coagulate and fracture, settling under their own weight. These viscous surfaces do more than record external action; rather, they register an internal upheaval. Pigments assert their own pull, guiding attention and determining how images emerge through repetition as a lived process that resists closure.
The exhibition is an immersive, sensorial invitation to touch with the eyes. Painting bears witness to the passage of time, accruing in sedimentary layers. In Field Notes, meaning remains contingent, perception fluid, and form perpetually in the act of becoming — held together not by completion, but by the quiet, durational persistence of what is observed.
Ushmita Sahu
