Govinda Sah'Azad': Absent Presence

About

The exhibition brings together a new body of large-scale and smaller paintings rendered in oil and acrylic on linen and canvas. The works are informed by Sah’s intriguing combination of insights into his local environment and his ongoing metaphysical musings about the nature of reality itself.

While studying at the College of Fine Art in Kathmandu, Sah had first become aware of the work of the English artists, J. M. W. Turner, and John Constable. While the latter amazed him with his ‘cloud studies’, it was the manner in which the former represented light in all its various manifestations that most fascinated Sah. Further studies, at Wimbledon College of Art, brought him to London, in 2008, before a later move to Margate introduced him to the Kentish seacoast where Turner himself was thrilled to discover that unique quality of light that suffuses so many of his later paintings. Today, Sah lives and works in Margate.

Sah’s work is composed of densely interwoven layers of mark-making, using oil and acrylic in what Sah describes as a ‘long unfolding conversation between the artist and his canvas.’ The painting ‘replies’ by proposing new areas for consideration and further exploration of the process continues until a successful balance point is reached. In this way, works like

Absence Presence become an example of a ‘logovisual’ approach to grappling with the conundrums that beset all of us; the painting grew out of isolation and the artist’s feelings of separation from his distant family during ‘lockdown’. Sah remarks, ‘The more I thought about my family, the more I became aware of their constant presence in my daily life. The “problem” only exists because of my own unreal expectations, my fixed projection of the world. By teasing it apart, deconstructing it and reconfiguring it afresh, I realised a much deeper truth: that I cannot be ‘apart’ from my mother or my family, we are always connected and can never be separated from each other, not even by distance.’