GIRISH is not a painter or artist in the conventional sense. Art or painting is a form of life for him, a way of grappling with life and making it bearable or another means to exorcise the pain and darkness within.

Looking through the series of recent paintings of Girish, one gets a feeling of loneliness and desolation emanating from them. These paintings, dark and brooding, seem to be struggling and suffering to reach out – to the brightness without, beyond or hereafter. They are like the colour patterns that constantly unfold behind our closed eyes; sharp lines and crowding brush strokes proliferate in these little spaces, throbbing together or moving past to create patterns and moods. Akin to certain feelings or obsessions that refuse to leave us; they obstinately multiply feeding upon each other, always returning to haunt us, or like palimpsests, insistently working their way over and over into the caverns that we are, to communicate a certain yearning, hurt, guilt or a certain density of feelings, as it were.

Always shunning figuration of any kind, Girish's paintings work on moods, hence the series is aptly named 'mindscapes'. Naturally, these paintings breathe easily in darker hues, always hastening to thicken towards darker shades of blues, greens and blacks. Very rarely do lighter colours find a space here, if at all they appear, they always doodle themselves into complex and intricate patterns.

In their own way these ever-darkening and muted colours speak about the very impossibility of communication. Working through moods, they stumble upon moods and forebodings and constantly create different yet repetitive patterns. But they have a certain inviting density to them that takes us into dark, ponderous spaces.

Not having to prove any point, live up to manifestoes or make any 'breaks', Girish brushes his way through the maze of colours, in his own way, finding rather than seeking. Naturally, his works are erratic and uneven, within and without. It doesn't make any claims, nor assert any. May be it is this deep tentativeness and non-assertion that easily opens them up to us and transports us into its worlds.

Free of any kind of luggage, aesthetic or ideological, these paintings are like coded suicide notes; painful but irrepressible notes about oneself that seeks no redressal from the world. Their self-cancellations are not negative, but instead warning signals for us to look in and out. It needs a lot of freedom, energy and courage to express life as it comes, 'as is where is'. Girish takes this risk and in the gamble, pulls out several things, sometimes patterns and moods, sometimes boredom and repetition, but in any case, it is a risk that makes us transcend what and how we are…………