One of the opening works in artist Priyanka Choudhary’s new show at Gallery Maskara in Mumbai, ‘I will lie to you forever’, looks like a lit-up brain scan. Titled ‘#108’ (all the canvases are named after shades in the Pantone family), the base is the colour of lemonade. Akin to subway graffiti, it is buried under drips of black, greys, and Barbie pink. Fragments from plastic gunny sacks are pasted roughly along the margins. Letters and illegible squiggles make up the last layer.  

A graduate of Delhi College of Art (1997), this is Choudhary’s fifth solo show at the 15-year-old art gallery (ongoing till March 2, 2024). Her previous shows The Second Throw (2015), 1914-2014 (2014), Tetanus Midas (2011) and Nul to Now (2010) held forth on violence and peace and the relationship between birth and death and included large-scale installations composed of porcelain, glass or bamboo, and performance art. Her new show, which covers 13 canvases and two typography sculptures, seems more decorous in comparison. But, as earlier, her new work charts her disquietude with truths and half-truths. The first sculpture spells out ‘Lie’, with the letters jumbled in a pendulum formation; the second one contains the letters of ‘Truth’, in red and black steel, suspended from the ceiling like trapeze art.

The paintings contain messages such as “I will lie to you forever”, “She tells her secrets to strangers”, “I see myself naked,” and “I keep losing and finding myself in your clothes”. But, they have to be uncovered and understood among the splatter of pigment and plaster. #710 resembles a hand-drawn wall advertisement, which has faded over time and been decorated with bird droppings. With a background in commercial art, Choudhary works with text as much as colour in this show. Albeit, the copy stays obscured in #710, for Choudhary finger-paints white plaster all over as if applying chuna on paan (betel leaf).

Four of the works are companion pieces that use one solid block of colour—#1795 (red); #116 (yellow); #1767 (white); and #689 (lilac)—raining down the canvas, with text appearing and disappearing in camouflage. Here, Choudhary plays with the letters like an errant font designer, almost creating a captcha with the words. Sometimes majuscule, minuscule, mirrored, and broken, the letters lead and mislead the viewer into Choudhary’s preoccupations. One in particular, #1767, with “I see myself naked” stencilled on it, resembles a wall corroded with fingernails. 

Two other works, #426 and #431, are of one mind. Both look like blackboards splayed with chalk marks. Both have book pages as part of the canvas; ‘Pride and Prejudice’ in the case of the latter. Both end with uppercase text at the bottom, such as the grammatically mangled “Me don’t hold, me don’t dare”. Additionally, both have abrasions and bumps, where the plaster has coalesced and coarsened, turning the canvas into sandpaper. 

In the series, Choudhary marshals materials of construction from her previous works: clay, plaster and stones, and pairs them with twigs, plastic fabric, coal ash and gold dust. However, it’s the use of colour, chaotic and subconscious, that enlivens the pieces. When Jackson Pollock invented his technique in the late 1940s, space exploration and global atomic destruction were no longer just ideas on paper. Choudhary lives in a world where the James Webb telescope has already Instagrammed space and some anonymous CGI artist has already imagined the multiverse. So, her works ought to go one step further, like ‘#219’, in which the background resembles the cosmos and the foreground looks like drenched earth. The plaster resembles cloudbursts that have sprinkled the universe with gold and grey confetti. The diptych, ‘#368’, is a similar mishmash of five paintings in one, the top layers roughly scrubbed away to reveal an oceanic bed.

The work that gives the exhibition its title, #656, has blues that run all over the place, and strips of plastic stuck on like centipedes. From this string curtain emerges: “I will lie to you forever”. As gallerist Abhay Maskara says, “The paintings look attractive, but there’s a lot of angst.”

I will lie to you forever will be on view at Gallery Maskara from January 11 - March 2 2024.