Loathing and longing

Sunil Gawde's installations make you want to escape, but leave you thinking instead

A rt and math do not always go hand in hand "" one is necessarily boundless and protean; the other equally necessarily bound by laws, and rigid.

However, they need not be incompatible, as artist Sunil Gawde shows. Gawde has always had the touch of the mathematician about him, and has used his career to play with the addition and subtraction of form and colour, freely mixing form and structure with formlessness and freedom.

"I like to convert geometry into poetry," says Gawde, and he does so across all kinds of media, oil on canvas, sculptures, and most recently, installations. In this last, "Blind Bulb etc", six life-size sculptural installations pair minimalism with a stark conceptual clarity, challenging the viewer's perceptions about reality.

Sunil Gawde graduated in 1980 from the JJ School of Art in Mumbai, was awarded the Charles Wallace Award for 1995/96 by the British Council, and subsequently did a residency at the Glasgow School of Art for a year.

He first won acclaim as a painter in the 1990s for his gestural abstraction accompanied by minimalism. Gawde's works aim at injecting life into a dead piece, or, as he puts it, capturing "a frozen moment of a real process".

He has moved from painted images to actual objects of everyday life, leaving behind his canvas in favour of 3D images. In 2003, for his exhibition "Rain in Mumbai", he dotted his old Maruti windshield with raindrops of transparent resin, swept clean with a single sweep of a wiper: "Later, I felt that a moving wiper would make the frozen moment come alive, and that led me to my current sculptural installations with movements," says the artist.

The psychological need to bring movement and "the feel of life" to his art took two years. Using stainless steel, wood, resin, rubber, razors, glass, fiber, graphite and a host of other materials including naphthalene balls, he believes in not compartmentalising art.

"There should be no boundaries, and I should have the freedom to use any medium or material as long as it supports the concept," says Gawde.

So the "Blind Bulb" is a 5'6" giant replica of an electric bulb made of fibreglass, sheathed in carbon black, suspended by a rope from the ceiling, right in your face. For Gawde, "The bulb is perfect, light-spirited, and can metamorphose into the human body."

The "etc" consists of the remaining installations. Gawde's butterfly on a pedestal looks naïve and pretty until you take a closer look. Its body is a decorative silver knife, its wings patterned with 3,600 razor blades, and the slow, harsh sound of its wings grates on the nerves. "It's all about perception and reality," he states.

There are two other giant electric bulbs "" one with a huge bulging eyeball looking into space "waiting for enlightenment, the reason for life"; and the other diffused with its broken and dangling filament still slightly flickering. It "still has hope of life", even when its other broken piece lies dead inside the bulb.

Elsewhere, a time-conscious steel polished giant pendulum suspended against a black tower-box oscillates as a small spring-like caterpillar struggles to keep moving anti-clockwise along the rim of the bob. Does the mirror on the bob reflect one's image of our constant struggle with a life bounded by time?

"I want people to have their individual dialogue with each installation," says Gawde, "My art has an opening for the viewer to interpret his own experience."

Another installation, a six-foot brown, wormy piece on a mirror pedestal, lies flat and slowly curls itself into a hump.

After the gloomy lightbulbs, the weary, trudging caterpillar, the monster butterfly, and now this, you're wondering where the nearest exit is. Gawde points out that this particular installation "reflects the male organ, combining Freud's theory and the Indian philosophy on sex along with the worm". Your search for the exit becomes slightly more desperate.

But before you leave, you let Gawde have the last word. "I like mysteries," says Gawde, and points out that simplicity is actually not simple but "simply complex". And even though your nerves are on edge, you know his works will linger in your head long after you've left the exhibition. And that's where Gawde's power lies.