Mehlli Gobhai

Mehlli Gobhai's paintings reflect the interplay between minimal lines and lustrous backgrounds. His layered and textured application of somber colors creates a gradual luminosity that evokes the feeling of aged parchment or leather that has been sanctified over time. Gobhai's approach to serial painting is not just repetition, but a way to intensify, affirm and renew his themes. Serialism unifies an artist's work over time and enables Gobhai to revisit past paintings to re-direct their impulses.

Gobhai's works address the split between surface and structure, a defining characteristic of modern painting. Gobhai reconciles these two principles by establishing a dynamic relationship between them. Surface and structure are finely tuned to each other, and Gobhai's paintings are an art of deep coloristic and textural saturation held in counterpoint by geometric precision.

Gobhai's paintings are not just visually stunning, but they also function as energy diagrams that hold a set of forces together through linear symmetries, chromatic assonances, and subtle allusions to the genres vestigially latent within his abstractionist idiom, such as the figure and the landscape. His paintings are a ritual theatre of forces that become a model of the universe. Gobhai's practice occupies a space midway between easel and altar, drawing metaphors from geomancy and cosmology to approach his work.