Expanding her lexicon of dots and lines, Sathi Guin's latest works invite inward journeys through intangible thoughts, habit patterns, and fleeting fixations. Adopting a language of abstraction and deliberate non-representation, these confront delicate negotiations of the subconscious, navigating everything from the mundane and trivial to the deeply engrossing.

Guin’s delicate brushstrokes create a dynamic interplay of fluidity and restraint in her large-scale acrylic paintings. Dots, often overlooked as they vanish into drawn lines, reappear as distinct, deliberate forms, fostering a dialogue between creator and creation, fragment and whole. This conversation extends into her sculptures, where twisted lines and magnified dots take on striking spatial forms. Her lines–– flowing like slow currents–– juxtapose anchored dots, evoking a delicate balance between the ever-present hum of daily life and the profound quiet of silence.

Guin’s works express the passage of time, shaped through a slow, ritualistic process. Each day, she approaches her practice with quiet urgency, channeling the body’s energy into creation. Her compositions evolve intuitively over months, driven by spontaneous responses to stimuli—daily life, conversations, poetry, literature, and memory. While her canvases reflect her mental and emotional landscapes, they remain non-referential. Through repetitive gestures, she encapsulates moments of tension—anguish, monotony, anger, fatigue, and stress. The repetition, while rooted in the presence of external anxieties, becomes a form of absence—a way to transcend the conscious weight of each moment, finding solace in the act of doing the same thing again and again.

At first glance, her works may appear defined by stark contrasts—paintings on black surfaces and sculptures in white. A closer engagement, however, reveals subtle shades of grey, where varying saturation adds depth and density. Light and shadow, connection and disruption, convergence and divergence blur the boundaries of background and foreground, challenging conventional perception. This sense of duality—or, rather, the subversion of it—aligns with Guin’s resistance to fixed labels. Her sculptures echo this attitude. Created by repurposing iron grills from her home, the fragmented rods are reassembled and covered in a delicate layer of white porcelain–– presented as organic forms adorned with large, white spheres. Clay becomes a deliberate material of choice; soft, malleable, and in direct contrast to the rigidity of iron. In preserving the iron beneath a fragile shell, Guin blurs boundaries between hardness and vulnerability, and creates a dialogue between interior and exterior, permanence and fragility.

Guin’s works embrace a sense of movement and dynamism. The closer one looks, the more abstract and shifting her forms become—labyrinthine and ever-changing, like cloud gazing, open to interpretation. In a world saturated with information and imagery, her minimalist approach invites reflection on how we engage with the unfamiliar and unrecognised. Guin challenges us to move beyond passive perception, urging active engagements with ideas, images, and overlooked nuances of ordinary life. Her works beckon us to reexamine seemingly innocuous structures, to see beyond the surface, and find depth in the undefined. 

Pooja Savansukha