Mute Painting

For me, ‘mute ‘painting’ poses a counterargument to the claim or concept that a painting is an ‘expression’; it expresses something.

Rather, for me, such an expression is a strategic political construct that suppresses the whole process of rejection, elimination, and muting those elements that, in the capacity of being inseparable and intricate parts of the process itself of such construction, could challenge the “meaning” that such a painting aims to achieve for the construct (painting) itself.

But the irony in the whole thing is that the “meaning” can never be final; it is always deferred farther and farther. Also, it is always arbitrary in the political sense of the term, and to suppress this, it claims to offer some sort of convenient logic while calling all other probabilities to be either illogical or anti-logical.

In fact, any “yes” can be arrived at by negating numerous “noes.” Ironically, these “noes always leave their traces in the ‘final’ version, the “yes” that is thus constructed. My project seeks to bring those arbitrary and political symbols of “no” to the forefront, to paint them instead so that they can be denied any definite identity other than being termed ‘anti’ or’mute’ paintings, opening up a world of any number of meanings, understandings, and misunderstandings.

Suvanwita Saha.