The Spell of Objects 

Prajakta Potnis’ paintings are permeated by a strange sense of stillness and soundlessness. The palette draws us into hushed pastels: cool blue, pale rose, fluid strawberry, serene lavender, placid grey, but also luminous peach and dark purple. Wrapped in sleep, these works hang on the walls of the gallery like dreaming babies: you cannot fathom their dreams, you can only detect what they think from the rhythm of the heartbeat, the sudden swallowing of a gust of air, the flapping of starfish hands. I choose the metaphor of the dreaming child because 26-year-old Potnis’ cool and gathered paintings exhibit both the trance-like quality of dreaming, with movement slowed down and objects held in long scrutiny, as well as its improbable logic of surprise.

We, too, recover a childlike awareness of first sensations when we look at Potnis’ images. We are startled by the first tang of fruit on the tongue, but also by the sight of a wriggling worm. And yet, as in ‘The Snow Queen’, we leave on our travels as children and come home to find that, although the flowers in the window-boxes and the cat in the door are the same, we have grown up. We look at these paintings again, and find ourselves disturbed by the dark recesses of rooms, the hidden contours of tumescent objects, the volume of bodies that hold the secrets of life and decay.

The objects that Potnis paints can suggest uncommunicative, ephemeral, floating chimeras: objects enveloped in a muted skin of paint, a seemingly planed-down surface that holds down the discontents that seem to bubble beneath, and which express themselves in the disquietude that provides these apparently still and soundless paintings with their insistent ground note. The artist evidently feels the need to distance herself from the emotions: to restrain colour and form from spilling over their boundaries, from leaking out of their prescribed skin, from revealing childhood awkwardness.

I would suggest that the still life, the nature morte, is an appropriate working proposition for these paintings. Even when she focuses on interiors and landscapes, which simmer with a cold fire, Potnis treats it as a still life. By which I do not mean a genre: rather, in my reading, the still life is a condition that affects – or infects – all other genres, since it dramatises in a particularly subtle manner the contest between the life force and the fact of mortality. A grey asbestos sheet with hard striations finds itself in a living room, stands inert, neither door nor window but a sunbreaker that has gate-crashed into the artist’s dreams. Potnis softens its intrusion with clouds of cream. A milk-white cloth flows from a shower, its elegant folds concealing a body. In a plate-glass lake, swans studded with egg-pearls float, stunned by a fairytale spell. Potnis deceives us with sophisticated surfaces that mediate subliminal impulses from childhood....

(Extract from a forthcoming essay)

Nancy Adajania