Article from Art Heritage catalogue

Four women Artists - by - Keshev Malik
 

When, as a matter of choice, an artist like Salvita Gomes Makhani turns her back on what might have been a lucrative career in advertising, foregoing guaranteed modes of quick success, one cannot but admire her exceptional courage. One is also compelled to take her work seriously and ask: What are those qualities which drew the attention to the world of advertising to her talent. And what is the direction of her more earnest quest?

Launched upon the perilous voyage of self-discovery, Salvita seems primarily concerned with the progress of the individual through tenebrous regions towards the dim light at the end of the tunnel. In the lithograph titled I Beg your Pardon, the turned head of the woman, mature in years, signifies knowledge, the experience of being. In this, as in other prints, the draughtmanship is chaste and rigorous. She prefers the interplay of black and white, light and shade, only rarely introducing colour. This imbues her work with a tone of austerity and high seriousness. The expression in the eyes implies the recollection of something out of the common, an experience that does not make for easy cheerfulness. In Family Affaire the plight is not merely that of destitution, but of the awareness of mortality, the two infants who look up spell-bound emphasizes the poignancy of the situation. This worldly reality serves as the background to works like the Pieta and other Biblical themes: The Temptation of Eve, The Expulsion from the Garden of Eden, and so on, which reflect her strong Catholic upbringing.

But even when the Biblical impulse ebbs, works like The Flower Girl, Woman with a Cigarette and Tribal Girl continue the gaunt, severe rendering which in its spirit is somewhat reminiscent of the famous Gandhara sculpture of the emaciated Siddharatha. Some of the prints are extremely expressive and telling, considering the economy with which the themes have been delineated. Bride of Fate, wasted and scrawny, with heavy shadows under her eyes, acknowledges pain and suffering, with the presentiment of a world beyond the terrestrial. Firm in her religious belief, the artist allows a strange light to emanate from a metaphorical crucifix. Her faith sustains her spirit against the realization of human transience, and it is this tragic sense of the ephemeral and the evanescent character of existence that lends her figures their distinctive pathos.

Salvita's talent reveals in gloom, the gloom of the crypt, but only as a state of mind through which her characters struggle through to the light. Salvation is achieved only through man's unequal struggle against the powers of darkness, man diminished by evil and circumstance, baffled by the strange twists of fate. Against the unblemished innocence of white are arrayed masses of grey forms. Salvita seems to use the print as a tract, a revelation of the hand of God, and though she is intensely observant of natural phenomena, she adjusts the earthly view to give her work and other worldly character, as though she sees more clearly with her eyes closed.

Salvita's ingrained Catholicism is the source of her strength, yet her sympathies are broad. She seems to recognize the fact that the element of darkness is inseparable from some of the noblest interpretations of the meaning of human existence. This awareness gives her work its purposiveness and constancy. Everything here asserts a transcendental potency. There is something durable and inspiring in the way these works through their sparseness and abnegation afford revealing intimations into the hidden layers of one's being.