Sanjeev Sonpimpare (b.1969) is an artist who seeks to liven up his vocabulary with mixed metaphors: naturalistic imagery in naturalistic colours together with an imitation of black and white PowerPoint graphics, without the intervening greys of photographs. The viewer has thus to shift gears, so to say, readjusting his sensibility to take in the strange mix of the known and the little known in a new pairing.

While his language looks to juxtapose contraries—the classical terms of high art with popular, technologically-generated graphics—the content reveals an uneasy relationship between the city-dweller and the city. A place where the isolated individual may lose his bearing, assailed by a sense of dislocation. 

In the work on view, Sonpimpare has painted with meticulous care women—perhaps devotees offering puja or dancers frozen in a mudra—in their garish saris. But the figures are abbreviated not, he seems to suggest, by design but chance damage. The print-like buildings of the background, intrude upon the crumbling foreground images, threatening to wipe them out by their increasing grab of space. But there’s no substance to the buildings, either, as reality turns anonymous, illusory.