Waking Up the Interiority
Viraj Mithani
→MFA PT 2023
Viraj’s RISD studio, in Viraj Mithani: Waking Up The Interiority.
Photo: Rishikesh Shinde
In his Painting graduate thesis book, Waking up the Interiority, just published in expanded form by Uncoated Print in Mumbai in an edition of 700, Viraj Mithani writes, “My studio work and my personal experiences are inextricably intertwined and sometimes contradictory. Spiritual and violent, natural and plastic, attached and detached—they all coexist in me. You can’t search a soul by dissecting a heart, but only by connecting with it.”
In the lushly illustrated, nearly 300-page volume, Mithani unfolds countless inextricable intertwinings. He recounts early childhood memories marked by his family’s late night story time, his grandfather’s passion for photography, and being a member of a tight knit community in his motherland, India. Through his paintings and prints, he highlights Indian traditions of art such as miniatures, Madhubani, and Godna schools, all which were disenfranchised and nearly lost during British colonization. All in all, his life and studio practice approaches painting through inherited, experiential, academic, and tangential learning. On a quest to navigate the plurality of global modernities, Mithani invents his own.
During his MFA program at RISD, Mithani found the studio critique sessions to be most vital. He considers them a meta- phorical puzzle of invaluable comments, questions, suggestions, references, observations, and discussions that over time morphed into new pictures, inspired new questions, and even led to new forms of expression, as in his poems composed of phrases and bits of crit conversation, one of which we’re grateful to excerpt here. — Olivier Mbabazi
The Fabulous Perversity of Your Imagination
What genre of miniatures are you referencing?
Is it important to understand the context of where you are sourcing images from?
The internal translation of these things is more than appropriation right now.
You’re not trying to fit into the canvas—that speaks to the overstimulation of images.
They feel infinite.
Bob Thompson messes with Matisse or Cézanne
Pigmentation plays on seduction
Inventive choice of split and form
Trust the purple one, where it’s more decisive than choreography
Slow down decisions and see what comes from slowing the creation
What is the psychology of the painting?
Construction of myth
Has a possibility of story but never quite reveals the story
Procedure about the possibility of authenticity, ethically coming through the mark
Plays with what we understand when we look at an image
Expressionism—most of us don’t believe those marks actually mean angst
Unless you think about the division as part of how you contract the myth
Interested in the borders, connections, how all information is coalescing
Use more projections of the giclee
Reminds me of those tourists sand objects
What are the politics?
I like them up to 78%
Look at them rhetorically, never quite seals the deal with the story.
You have a body of work.
Joy of painting.
Joy for Viraj is playing god, in a gaslighting sense, which can conflate ideas.
What is the pleasure and joy to you?
Where are the tricks with the transparency?
Exposed to light, hanging, overlapping
The joy of assembling myths transmits, what is the substance behind the myths
Myth is putting things next to each other, versus depth of writing or play that come with things in paintings
