Rithika Pandey

Born: Varanasi, India — November 1998 / Living: Mumbai, India

Interview by Sendra Uebele — January 2020

Sendra Uebele: Who are you?

Rithinka Pandey: In simple terms, I’m an artist from India and an avid Ramen enthusiast. I also love pandas & black panthers. 

SU: How did you first get into making?

RP: Must be my nomadic childhood for sure. My father had work across Africa so we were travelling around until we settled in Mumbai a few years later. I think the only way my confused, jet lagged self was making sense of the world was through translating the interesting visual information I encountered in transit as drawings. I remember Ma giving me a big tub of Play Doh and Crayola and I’d spend days drawing on sheets of paper and making silly objects with clay. 

SU: What are some of your most important artistic inspirations?

RP: Kerry James Marshall, Haruki Murakami, Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg, Eric Timothy Carlson, Rene Magritte, Olafur Eliasson & Rumi. 

SU: What’s your relationship to surrealist painting? Do you feel like you classify yourself within any specific art movement?

RP: What I’ve always loved about surrealism is that it goes beyond painting into a way of life somehow, especially for artists like Dali. But what introduced me to surrealist thought, however, were the sublime works of Haruki Murakami. I’m glad my practice started that way because it’s important for me to develop that thought process before I can get going with building the image. I can’t make a painting if I don’t pose a strange question or situation to myself first. The thoughts that circulate, then start bringing in colour and form that manifest into a painting that you see. I’m just trying to perceive reality through that absurd lens the surrealists used, even if I don’t usually employ the formal techniques from their paintings. It’s difficult to say if my practice really falls into a specific movement because it gathers bits and pieces from several of them. It’s similar to mixing color; a bit of this a bit of that; though what’s formed remains subtly un-nameable. 

SU: What is your studio/work space like?

RP: My studio space is my sanctuary. I love the fact that it has so much interesting stuff lying around. I can walk into the space and move around and look at things kept on the floor, stuck on the walls and ideas start germinating. There’s a lovely collection of found objects and images kept on the table. I combined the two to create ‘useless art objects’, for example there’s a jar full of sea water with two images of a city and mountains; A funnel is repurposed as a listening, hearing, perceiving device; A string of pearls in fixed on a five- foot canvas. Some other oddly shaped objects are kept on the broad edges of the stretched canvas (that works like a shelf), to add dimensional qualities to the painting. In another corner are my masterful creations of colour kept safely in disposable coffee cups. Light pastel shades to darker colours; feels like a gelato store! I’ve also done several impulsive charcoal drawings on paper in addition to collages that cover a large space of the wall. My paintings are huge so they’ve been taking up quite a bit of space now. And with plans to bring in more interesting objects as well as building some from scratch, I might have to get myself a larger space and possibly some plants. 

SU: Can you talk about your relationship to color? It’s very vibrant in your work! 

RP: If I could eat colour, and that means ‘color outside of a bounded form’ as a free floating ‘thing-in-itself’, I would. I might just immerse myself in it and let my body disintegrate in its embrace. Making colours in my studio is such a satisfying process that it’s almost a bodily experience, bordering at a state of pleasure. Coming from a rich cultural landscapes like India and Africa, color is a truly powerful tool in explaining and exploring abstract information. I always use that as a source for building the poetics of my paintings. The works may seem vibrant, but there’s always a hidden sense of melancholy present. I never intend for it to bitter the experience of viewing the painting, but only sweeten it. I hope I’ve been able to accomplish that. 

SU: You use a lot of diagram-esque compositions in your paintings, where do these ideas usually come from?

RP: I love how diagrams and symbols have this strange ability to condense complex ideas into a simple yet ambiguous system of language. I got into incorporating diagrams within my work after I started reading more scientific books. I can explain a lot more of myself using these ‘codes’ than making any obvious portrayal of emotional information. A lot of these ‘diagrams’ are metaphors usually seeking to explain the human condition from my perspective. 

SU: Your paintings also seem to take place in imaginary rooms and spaces. Why do you like to construct spaces like this? Do you ever imagine living in them?

RP: It’s so much about my personal experiences within spaces. I was travelling quiet a lot the past year and I slowly became aware of the ways I emotionally responded to the rooms I stayed in the Airbnb, the train stations, the bathrooms or mostly everywhere else. Much of it was overlaid with homesickness and longing. It made me realise how the body and the space that surrounds it are, in a way, inseparable. Even if it isn’t self-evident at the beginning. You leave your presence behind in empty rooms and the space leaves behind its presence in your memory as well as in history. They shape each other. Temporarily notwithstanding. From where I stand, I don’t think stories become apparent without an environment, or having some sense of ‘dimensionality’. I often daydream thriving and being happy in these spaces I’ve painted, maybe it’s finally time to start bringing them to life. 

SU: Has your relationship with your gender identity shaped how you make work? If so, how?

RP: Identifying with my femininity is crucial in the way my work shapes itself. It’s more than just being a woman. It constantly seems like the structure of our industrial society is primarily masculine, with tough hands made of concrete that don’t know what tenderness and flow means. That’s why so much of the narratives I construct in my paintings contain protagonists with feminine physical and mental orientations even though the environments around them sometimes aren’t. I consciously try to make the characters empowering and self-aware through important elements such as their clothes, pupil direction and posture. Maybe it comes from how I move my body and interact with things in real space that informs the quality of the subjects in my work. 

SU: What other artists do you think people should be paying attention to right now?

RP: Larissa Sansour, Aleksandra Waliszewska, Lexie Smith, Tschabalala Self, Eric Timothy Carlson, Kensuke Koike, Theaster Gates, Cai Guo Jiang, Helen Marten, Peter Friedl, Mathew Ronay, Danny Fox, Moonasi 

SU: Tell us about any new projects you are working on!

RP: I’m working on quiet a lot of different self-projects this year. It’s important that I begin to manifest the contexts of my paintings into the real space, that means creating works using found objects or fabricating them from scratch. I want to recontextualize the meaning of what certain spaces can be initially understood as, into something expansive, sublime and communal. Its baby steps, but I have to start somewhere. I have my degree show this year so I’m developing my work around the inquiry of what a feminine structure is and how it’s presence as a representational painting along with the surreal object can transform a space. Besides that, I’m also low key working on an experimental & absurd short film using my love for collages. Also maintaining the compulsive habit of painting 365 days of the goddamn year.

This piece is part of Speciwomen's cross partnership with Adolescent Content.