Stockroom Kyneton, Gallery Two
03 December 2022 / 22 January 2023

RHETT D’COSTA
Veiled Pleasures

The exhibition, Veiled Pleasures, draws inspiration from engagement with diverse cultures, rejoicing in the ways in which light, space, atmosphere, and colour can build situated narratives.

The paintings explore architectural space, colour, and forms by referring to my lived and visual experiences of Moghul and Rajput painting and architecture during many trips to India. Using the garden as a point of departure, the paintings consider the richness and complexities of palace and court life, particularly the veiled pleasures and sensuality alluded to in Indian miniature paintings and Moghul architecture which so often utilises screens and passageways to delineate and connect private and public spaces and social interactions and engagements.

Drawing on the colour, complex spatial compositions, multiple narratives, and architecture in Indian miniature paintings as a source of reference, the paintings utilise a range of tropes as a way for the viewer to move through the exhibition space formally and conceptually. Forms and narratives build and dissolve across the multiple perspectives, planes and panels. Colour and tonality coalesce as a way of connecting space. Composition and multiple vantage points work in opposition to this, bringing about a sense of disorientation and fragmentation. This seemingly paradoxical position ultimately produces a position of indeterminacy. It is this very atmosphere that the paintings attempt to cultivate; a tension created through this situated position which can potentially translate across time and space to more contemporary social, spatial, and temporal experiences and contexts.

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