Abstract is beautiful

Artist Puneet Kaushik presents his latest series of works titled Daraar - Beneath the Faultline at India Art Fair from January 29 to February 1. The works reflect no longer something remote, but abstractions of life itself. Kaushik's bodies of work are aesthetic and material dimensions of extractions, accumulation, territorialisation, condensations and fractures underlying the visible reality of urban life. They are neo-expressionist, collages of kaleidoscope materials and techniques - wire mesh, paint, bead work, carpet craft, line drawings and organic dyes that bring to the surface histories of tension that exist just beneath the ordinariness of everyday lived humanity. 

Known for using methodologies and traditional techniques incorporating tribal and folk art like the works are of steel wire mesh, woven hibiscus and coffee stains on paper, natural dyes, tufting the carpet technique, dabkha and bead work.

In his works, Puneet has been successfully driven by a single idea or concept, injecting an element of exploration, with materials offering their own guiding agency; and in this respect he marks a posture of difference.

The guiding concept behind the majority of the works has been around the idea of Identity, the dealing with the self. The beauty and the ugliness within the surface; the superficial and the deeper self, textured and layered by different circumstances where it is rare to be in a position to penetrate into the real self.

Puneet has been intrigued by age-old traditional techniques like knitting, crochet and embroidery, rooted deep in our cultures as a means of talking about the self. For example, the traditional Tibetan technique using a process of embroidery where two or more beads are stitched in one go was normally done not only to enhance the jewellery or crown but also to thicken the surface in order to protect and keep one warm.