OF SILENCE AND WHITE NOISE : SATHI GUIN
January 09 - February 15 , 2025
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, her paintings and sculptural works consider delicate negotiations of the subconscious, navigating a wide spectrum from the mundane and trivial, to the deeply engrossing.
Guin’s process is inherently meditative, rooted in the slow passage of time and the rhythms of her daily life. Each day, she approaches her practice with quiet urgency, channeling her energy into creation. Her compositions evolve intuitively over weeks and months, shaped by spontaneous responses to her surroundings—day-to-day routines, passing conversations, fragments of poetry, literature, and other moments. While deeply personal, her works resist specific narratives, instead capturing a mental landscape that remains open to interpretation.
Guin’s intricate lines and forms radiate a palpable tension that is both conscious and instinctive, displaying an interplay of fluidity and restraint. Repetition is central to her practice, serving as more than a formal technique. Through the recurring gestures of her brush for example, she captures instances of intense emotion—anguish, monotony, anger, fatigue, and stress. Yet, her practice is not a mere expression of these feelings; it is a means of transcending them. By engaging in the ritualistic act of reiteration, she transforms external anxieties into forms of introspection.
In some areas, Guin’s lines coalesce into cross-hatched patterns, subtly reminiscent of the weaving her mother once did to create asanas for sitting on the floor while her father was at work. This intimate memory lends a profound sense of time and waiting—a quiet acknowledgment of life’s slower patterns. Her works effectively capture fleeting moments as well as the broader weight of time as she melds fragments of memory, sentiment, and observation.
Flowing like currents, Guin’s lines are juxtaposed with anchored dots, blurring boundaries between stillness and motion. Often overlooked as they blend into drawn lines, these dots reappear as distinct forms, sparking a conversation between creator and creation, fragment and whole. This interplay reflects Guin’s exploration of tensions that can define human experience—between past and present, the visible and invisible, spontaneity and structure. Her abstraction evolves through these relationships, creating works that are deeply personal yet universally resonant.
Guin’s visual language extends seamlessly into her sculptural practice, where twisted lines and magnified dots are reimagined as striking spatial forms. Although she does not formally identify as a sculptor, her foray into three-dimensional work over the past two years emerged organically from her innate habit of “making things”. This inclination, rooted in her approach to designing every corner of her home, inspired her to explore materials in ways that exceed function. Earlier experiments included transforming everyday objects—such as utensils—into artworks by covering them with vibrant, coloured beads, blurring the boundaries between utility and expression. Her current sculptures expand this ethos of metamorphosis, incorporating fragments of an iron grill from her home that was meant to be discarded. Guin saw potential in its fractured form, choosing to repurpose the pieces and breathe new life into them. These rods are carefully joined, and the rigid framework is softened with a delicate layer of porcelain clay, resulting in organic, flowing forms adorned with smooth white spheres.
For Guin, porcelain clay embodies spontaneity and ease—its dough-like pliability and matte white finish offering a sense of purity and elegance without the need for glazing. Her sculptures navigate contrasts such as fragility and resilience, interior and exterior, permanence and transience. By encasing the iron framework, the clay preserves the material beneath while transforming its external form, inviting reflections on the relationship between the visible and the concealed. This act of covering—shielding inner strength with a delicate porcelain surface—explores themes of preservation and transformation, while the interaction between the malleable porcelain and rigid iron captures ideas of strength and vulnerability.
Guin’s works manifest ultimately as shifting, elusive forms that captivate the viewer’s gaze. The closer one looks, the more abstract and labyrinthine they become—like clouds that morph with each glance, evoking a sense of impermanence. This quality summons viewers to bring their own experiences, emotions, and perceptions into the encounter. At first glance, the works appear defined by stark contrasts—paintings rendered on deep black surfaces and sculptures in pristine white. Closer engagement reveals a world of subtle gradations and intricate detail. The varying saturation of her brushstrokes lends depth and density, while the interplay of light and shadow dissolves the conventional divisions between background and foreground. This nuanced juxtapositioning of connection and disruption, convergence and divergence, challenges fixed ways of seeing, further encouraging viewers to embrace ambiguity and the multiplicity of meanings her works hold.
The consistent sense of duality—and Guin’s deliberate subversion of it—reveals her resistance to fixed labels. Her work encourages us to notice the overlooked details of everyday life—the transient moments, subtle shifts, and unnoticed patterns. In a world increasingly shaped by distraction, information overload, and the relentless bombardment of external stimuli, her art offers a rare refuge for contemplation. It invites deeper reflections, and a momentary retreat from the noise. The minimalism of her forms, while seemingly simple, belies their depth, urging viewers to peel back layers and uncover nuances that are neither fixed nor immediately apparent.
On one level, Guin’s art functions as a profound meditation on scale. Her abstraction bridges the microcosmic and the macrocosmic, conjuring both the hyper-complexity of something as small as a single cell and the boundless, enigmatic expanse of the cosmos. Each element—a dot on her canvas or a curve in her sculptures—resonates with echoes of a larger whole. This approach highlights the paradox of existence: how the smallest units of matter can encapsulate the infinite, and how the infinite, in turn, is built from the smallest of parts. Yet, Guin’s considerations of dimension or perspective are not solely formal or aesthetic. In asking us to reconsider how we deal with the unfamiliar and the unrecognised, they can also gesture toward broader societal and political questions.
Guin disrupts the passivity of surface-level consumption, urging a deeper awareness of the visible and invisible structures that shape our understanding of the world. She highlights the labour of reflection—a deliberate, introspective process that mirrors the thoughtful pace of her creations. For Guin, abstraction is not an endpoint but a gateway to complexity, a method of revealing what might otherwise remain unnoticed. This approach feels particularly vital in a world dominated by hegemonic constructs that often simplify or obscure intricate systems of power and inequality. These frameworks condition us to accept such dynamics as natural or incidental, shaping not only our perceptions of the world but also our sense of self. Guin’s art challenges this conditioning, offering a space to engage more thoughtfully with the forces that influence both collective and personal realities.
Rather than conveying a specific message, Guin’s works aim to cultivate a lasting awareness. They encourage us to find significance in the mundane—whether in art, daily life, or the societal frameworks that inform our perspectives. Her art serves as a pathway for self-examination, encouraging viewers to examine their own habits and unconscious patterns—those automatic loops shaped by the environments and systems we inhabit. Through abstraction and the nuanced interplay of forms, Guin’s practice sharpens our awareness of these mental rhythms and prompts critical questions surrounding our biases, preconceived notions, and predilections. In this way, her art becomes an exercise in mindfulness, offering a chance to move beyond ingrained tendencies and explore different ways of seeing and understanding.
In navigating the tension between silence and white noise, Guin’s art transforms life’s static hum into a contemplative space. It invites us to listen more closely—not only to the quiet truths embedded in her works but also to the rhythms of our own minds, the neural patterns that govern us, and the intricate systems shaping the world we inhabit.
Pooja Savansukha
Images
Installation
Press
CN Traveller, 9 January, 2025
