WRITINGS ON THE WALL: SUBHAKAR TADI
July 09 - August 14 , 2026
"If you don't run your subconscious mind, someone else will
run it for you."
— Florence Shinn, The Game of Life and How to Play It, 1925
The impulse to leave a mark on a wall is among the oldest human
instincts, one that precedes literature, outlasts most institutions, and has
never fully been contained by either. Walls hold more than structures; they
carry records of what was written and what was concealed. It is this layered
quality of the wall that Vadodara-based artist Subhakar Tadi has spent more
than two decades working with and working through.
Born in Andhra Pradesh and trained as a printmaker, first at
Andhra University, Visakhapatnam, then at the Faculty of Fine Arts at M.S.
University Baroda, where he has lived and worked since 2003, Tadi brings to
painting a printmaker's awareness of the surface, of the way an image is built
in layers, and of how what lies beneath a mark is as significant as the mark
itself.
In this body of work, Tadi makes the wall both his subject and his
method. The wall, after all, was where images first lived, from prehistoric Bhimbetka
cave paintings to the frescoes of the Byzantine and Renaissance worlds; to mark
a wall was among the earliest and most public of human expressions. The
histories he draws on are more recent, but no less layered - the Berlin Wall
covered over decades in the testimonies, the Israeli West Bank separation
barrier layered with murals, the US-Mexico border that has drawn artists,
migrants, and cameras in equal measure. Each of these walls bears its own
record of institutional power. He transposes this sensibility onto the canvas
itself. For him, the painting is what becomes the wall.
There exists a more intimate memory rooted in this logic, watching
his own daughter in his studio, covering whatever surface she finds with the
unbridled confidence of a child who has not yet been told where the boundaries
are. At school, she is contained and directed, instructed in the discipline of
staying within the line. This tension between the freedom of mark-making and
the demand to fill in a boundary is, in many ways, the backdrop to his works.
The large-scale oil paintings that form the core of this
exhibition are, at first encounter, disarmingly beautiful. Meticulously
rendered urban facades, architecturally precise and almost cinematic in scale. It
is only gradually, and then unmistakably, that a second register emerges -
graffiti spread across these surfaces, bold and declarative, drawing on the
traditions of artists like Banksy and Basquiat, who understood that to mark a
public surface is already a political act. But where these predecessors worked
in the street, Tadi operates in the inverse, bringing the street's urgency
inward, into the formal language of painting. The landscape, as Tadi puts it,
"is not the subject, it is the playground."
This reflection takes shape in Window of prophetic dreams
(2023). A figure reading his newspaper, the most ordinary of gestures, yet
loaded with the particular dread of our present moment. The violence he reads
about is geographically remote, yet his imagination makes its proximity
immediate, seating it at the dinner table, placing it in the comfort of
familiar rooms. Around him, the other figures move through the scene with an
almost theatrical calm, the practised indifference of those for whom the news
of elsewhere remains, for now, elsewhere. What the work quietly unearths is a
condition both sympathetic and unsettling. How thoroughly we have trained
ourselves to understand violence only in its most distant forms, as something
that happens elsewhere, to others, beyond our walls, while the ambient
violences of our daily arrangements go unnamed and unremarked. In the corner of
the composition, barely perceptible, a dog watches. Aware, present, undeceived,
the only figure who sees the scene for what it is, unburdened by the peculiarly
human capacity for selective sight.
If Window of prophetic dreams alludes to a modern immunity,
an accumulated insensitivity to the state of things, What is your next step?
(2023) addresses the machinery behind it. The work traces the slow drift from
citizen to subject, from a collective that thinks to a crowd that is thought
for. To spend too long within the crowd, Tadi suggests, is to risk becoming the
crowd, our senses quietly rewritten by forces invested in keeping them legible
and manageable. The mantra of development, rehearsed across every billboard,
every political rally, every packaged promise of a better future, becomes in
this work not evidence of progress but its masquerade, a mechanism for the
colonisation of private thought by public spectacle.
The Black painter series (2019) stays with this question of
symbols and their survival. Here, Tadi turns his attention to the public idol,
statues of national figures, some standing, some shrouded in the uncertain
space between veneration and erasure. The point is never the idol itself, but
the ideology it was built to hold. A statue, Tadi came to understand, could be
broken and rebuilt; the ideology it carries cannot. These works operate through
a palette of near-total black. For Tadi, trained in printmaking and long drawn
to the multiple nuances within a single colour, black is not absence but
saturation, a form of protest against the transparency that power demands of
its subjects while extending none in return.
Against the scale and intensity of the oil paintings, a smaller
group of watercolours and charcoal drawings offer an intimate counterpoint.
Here, the gaze narrows to workers on ships, bodies defined by the weight of
physical effort, present not as incidental background but as subject. Where the
large paintings position their figures within spectacle, these smaller works
move closer and attend more tenderly. They draw on a principle long central to
Tadi's thinking, that for every word there is an image, and for every image, a
thousand words.
The title Writings on the Wall gestures at something both
familiar and newly strange, something the works themselves keep returning to - that
the wall is not a neutral surface. That what is written on a wall is what could
not be said anywhere else, and that the act of reading it is never entirely
passive.
There is nothing easy about Subhakar Tadi's work, and nothing
reckless about it either. He is not interested in the visceral jolt or the
provocation that exhausts itself. Nor is he content with the posture of the
pacifist who observes and withdraws. What he is after is something more
cerebral, more lasting, the question that continues to work on you long after
you have left the room. In an era when the image is both weapon and
anaesthetic, when what we see has been so carefully arranged before it reaches
us, Tadi's canvases propose a different kind of engagement. The city's walls
are where power writes its version of events. His paintings are where that
version is held up, examined, and for the first time, perhaps, actually read.
Images
Installation
Press
What The Walls Remember: Subhakar Tadi’s art traces the shifting literature of the masses on urban surfaces
Subhakar Tadi’s Ongoing Solo Exhibition Titled 'Writings On The Wall' Captures The Pulse Of The City
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