Palindrome/Anagram Painting

2017–2018
Mixed media on canvas
96 × 72 in. / 244 × 183 cm.
Installation view, Templon, Brussels

With Palindrome/Anagram Painting, Jitish Kallat returned to painting after a five-year hiatus from the medium. During this time, his long-standing engagement with ideas of time, transience, sustenance and the cosmological took the form of large elemental drawings, investigative animations, photo-works and sculptures.

Kallat also worked on two exploratory drawing projects: a hexagonal vitrine of studies titled Flowchart (2015) and a suite of folded drawings titled Tetralemma (threefold postulates) (2017). In these works, private ruminations, working studies and discarded references were assembled as provisional pictorial constellations.

A meticulously hand-drawn graph undergirds each painting. Recalling the reversibility of a palindrome, the paintings invite reading across multiple orientations; they are also anagrammatic, bringing their components into new associative formations. Abstract gestures seem to crystallise and acquire perceptible form, as though celestial orbits, geographical coordinate systems, and botanical and topographical evocations were briefly coming into view.