The Surface paintings, made from 2021-2022, appear abstract but are literal translations of flat architectural fragments. They look like maps because they are maps: they trace a real patch of the built world at a roughly one-to-one ratio, color to color, shape to shape. These are surfaces the artist encountered in his neighborhood on brief outings while his city of Vadodara was on lockdown. Snapping photos with his mobile phone, he would return to the studio and steadily render the image on canvas, inch by inch. Despite his methodical transcription, Karmakar’s paintings never belie their scale or precise locale. Each painting is a topographical realm.
Although his recent work is derived directly from digital imagery, Karmakar plays with significant shifts in scale, both materially and pictorially. For instance, he’s made a number of cityscapes that vary in size from 10 x 14 inches to 60 x 144 inches. By comparison to the Surfaces series, his urban scenes look model-like and miniaturized, even when they’re at their largest. They are eerie in their mimetic realism, dense with the evidence of human activity, but utterly absent of people.
Witness is a key concept for Karmakar. His History Paintings depict scenes of daily life in the province of Gujarat, of masked and uniformed municipal workers, socially distant gatherings, and the grim tasks of administering the dead. Collecting uncredited journalistic images from his local online news source, the artist transcribes each one onto a canvas not much bigger than his computer screen. Side by side, he studies the image and copies it, making each one over the course of a single day. Collectively, these paintings add up to a chronicle of death, of waiting, and anxiety. As an artist, Karmakar is a witness, just like us, refreshing his news feed but staying with the images that speak to him, even if they’re difficult to digest.
Abir Karmakar told me that he wants to “give the image another life through painting.” I initially assumed he meant that painting offers a sense of permanence to the ephemerality of images, that he can make a material fact that will remember beyond the lifespan of a human or even a jpg. But his three monumental panoramic pieces, all from 2022, challenge our assumptions about paintings as objects. Indeed, they already appear to be in a state of degradation, pixelated and blurry. The proportions of these pieces resemble Chinese handscrolls, a format for painting that is never seen in its entirety, but rather section by section. Here, the constant flow of people, each comprised of countless dappled datapoints, echoes the stream of information, constantly pouring in and out of our frame of vision. The artist seeks here, through painting, an image which is unfixed and precarious, just like life itself.
Josephine Halvorson
July 2022
Massachusetts, USA