The paint that covers over the thing itself, historical sealant of re-presentation, has become indecent in Anjuli Rathod’s works. It is bare and exposed. There is nothing for it to cover over. For loss is both no-thing and simultaneously the mark of the effaced (mark or otherwise). The latter, however, nearly dissolves in itself—a water-based mixture Rathod paints with which occasions a wispiness—vulnerable to time, as in visibly effected temporally, and materializing into the mutable, if not forgotten, trace. So, the image falls away. Fallen, but not to nothing. In such ruins what remains is loss of world and of self in this doubling inertia of representation of loss and of representation itself. The latter is another always already lost: infinite mirroring. Just as Rathod hazards to not impose meaning, perhaps more emphatically, she does not impose cathartic, mythological processes that imply reverence nor pathological processes that inspire reprehension. Regarding meaning, however, the crushing weight of that singular heaviness that belongs to the tradition of painting remains a burden. It bears the remembrance and forgetting of such weight. In other words, the works, inescapably within the history of painting, still make see—but against and with the impasse.

A legible psychic vocabulary, impasse and beyond, is made seen by the recurrent content in the paintings. There is a directed fecundity to the psychic economies within Rathod’s works in terms of the reproduction of specific forms (arguably symbol and symptom) and imagery associated with birth and its aftermath—including mortality and the cosmological. Tubular forms recall the bodily of umbilical cords, intestines and blood vessels, while barred receptacles that evoke both the nautical and an infant’s crib navigate omnidirectional passages. The tubular and the nautical signal containers of/for dynamic passage with both forms quite literally carrying and framing the maternal, loss or trauma. In various paintings, the blood vessels transport caterpillars, cocooned caterpillars and butterflies in progressive sequence while in Ruptured Vein, the veins carry what appears to be blood cells. At the point of rupture, the ends of the veins, blood cells included, connect to severed heads. Elsewhere veins are converted into tethers joining animals to a baby mobile. In other sites, the crib-ship’s bars take on a viscosity that mimics the gelatinous of the tubular forms. Are they all one dis-continuous line—the same veins that pulse through our bodies? Metamorphoses take place interior and exterior to the tubular form as do breaks and continuity. There is no definite external to the internal and marked borders are porous if not, at times, merging through these events of transformation. In A River Runs Through, the break is not named (in the title), and yet a butterfly leaks out from the tubular vessel that goes into the crib-ship structure. The butterfly floats in the rushing river that seeps into the crib-ship through its gaps. Porous, viscid and malleable forms parallel the uncertainty of the temperamental translucency coloring the canvases. Susceptibility drives the painting and loss marks it.

It is the point that cannot be fully reached and yet what we drive towards and with. In Stitched, a far more abstracted work, numerals float while three pliable sewing needles’ eyes pass through the same thread that intersects a “3”. Other threads cut throughout the frame while a face emerges from a rounded body of multicolored water. The face is pierced through with another sewing needle while the colored sections of the water somehow do not bleed uniformly into one another and create clean sections of color. Cuts, passes, varying thresholds abound as the painting comes into focus as a viable portion of a clock. The threads function as clock hands that do not exclusively indicate world-historical time, all its violence concentrated from instant to instant, but reference a longer cosmic time as well. The clock does not measure. Rather, it acknowledges various timelines including that of forgetting, masking and memory. It is from what is effaced, then, that Rathod rebuilds and ever towards that lost origin.

—Perwana Nazif



The Unbelievable Truth, 2023. Acrylic, flashe, watercolor, and soft pastel on canvas. 60”h x 64”w. Photo courtesy: Harkawik




Cradle, 2023. Acrylic, flashe, watercolor, and soft pastel on canvas. 60”h x 64”w. Photo courtesy: Harkawik



Prism, 2023. Acrylic, flashe, and watercolor on canvas. 46”h x 38”w. Photo courtesy: Harkawik



Mobile, 2023. Acrylic, flashe, and watercolor on canvas. 34”h x 40”w. Photo Courtesy: Harkawik



Cord, 2023. Acrylic, flashe, watercolor, and soft pastel on canvas. 34”h x 40”w. Photo Courtesy: Harkawik



Braid, 2023. Acrylic, flashe, watercolor, and soft pastel on canvas. 34”h x 40”w. Photo Courtesy: Harkawik



A River Runs Through, 2023. Acrylic, flashe, watercolor, and soft pastel on canvas. 60”h x 64”w. Photo courtesy: Harkawik



Ruptured Vein, 2023. Acrylic, flashe, watercolor, and soft pastel on canvas. 60”h x 64”w. Photo courtesy: Harkawik



Horizon Lines, 2024. Acrylic, flashe, watercolor, and soft pastel on canvas. 60”h x 64”w. Photo courtesy: Harkawik


Chrysalis


Harkawik
Los Angeles, CA 


September 2 - October 4, 2022
In Chrysalis, life, where it lives, when it leaves, the spirit, and interactions with such entities that can only take place in the gut are made visual. Life, as death, is liquid, and Anjuli Rathod renders the transformative in layers of water based paint. The life cycle of spirit, of presence, emotion, wet on the canvas, creates a luminescent image of what is left behind as the colors’ ability to move dries up.

A chrysalis is a chamber of dead skin built for transformation. A body within which a worm becomes paper thin. When it exits its husk, it floats on air. The exhausted flesh hangs from silk on the branch. We consider the butterfly beautiful, yet we imagine this insect trapped in our guts when we are unsettled. Sometimes this unsettled feeling is called love, the nausea of emotional connectivity with a specter projected from the mind onto animated flesh. We see the memory of something that used to move in someone’s lifetime in the blank space left behind where only light lands. I love you, and I know this, because my guts are crawling with insects. I miss you, and I know this, because my guts are fluttering with a winged infestation. My body holds the evidence of a completed transformation that makes me sick when I think of you. I love you. I miss you. Please forgive me.

In his 1942 essay, Water and Dreams, Gaston Bachelard said, “A being dedicated to water is a being in flux. He dies every minute. The pain of water is infinite.” When are we let go? Water is life, and water is dying. When they cross the river, memory drips from our faces in streams of confusion, because we can not see the traveler. We imagine them. Everything we see is light, and everything we feel is presence. We relive the terror of loss in the moments of their visitation, even if we are dying to be with them again. It’s a trap inside of a labyrinth. Grief and terror are felt in the body. Peace lives in the soul. Human life is in divine contradiction. We ascribe the spiritual nausea to a winged creature at the end of its promise, to an angel, to love, to avoid calling it what we know in our guts it really is: an awareness of the unknown.

—Toniann Fernandez





Chrysalis, watercolor, acrylic and flash on canvas, 52x60 inches, 2022


Underwater, watercolor, acrylic and flash on canvas, 54x60 inches, 2022


Asking Forgiveness, watercolor, acrylic and flash on canvas, 40x48 inches, 2022


Flame, watercolor, acrylic and flash on canvas, 20x16 inches, 2021


Above All Angels, watercolor, acrylic and flash on canvas, 26x32 inches, 2022


Untitled,  acrylic and flash on canvas, 10x8 inches, 2020


Passage, watercolor, acrylic and flash on canvas, 40x48 inches, 2021


Open Portal


Y2K Group
New York, NY 


October 17 – November 21, 2020




What fires, a burning room


Interstate Projects
Brooklyn, NY


February 8 – March 17, 2019





Sleep shapes, acrylic and flashe on canvas, 48x54 inches, 2019


Burial, acrylic and flashe on canvas, 48x54 inches, 2019


Refraction, acrylic and flashe on canvas, 58x48 inches, 2019


Red girls are spiders, acrylic and flashe on canvas, 58x48 inches, 2019


Book of Flowers, acrylic and flashe on canvas, 46x38 inches, 2019


Mirror, acrylic and flashe on canvas, 30x26 inches, 2019


Division, acrylic and flashe on canvas, 30x26 inches, 2019


Fissure, acrylic and flashe on canvas, 33x26 inches, 2019

Serban Ionescu & Anjuli Rathod


Safe Gallery
Brooklyn, New York


June 7 - July 15, 2018




© Anjuli Rathod 2022