Landscape painting was my earliest fascination. It was never my intention to get drawn into debates over beauty, its objectivity, or eternal qualities. It began with putting paint to canvas superficially, creating ideal portraits of Mumbai, and elevating its spaces from the everyday squalor of an overpopulated city bursting at its seams. I started to see this macro example of a city and its workings and internalising it.

I wanted to paint pretty pictures of these landscapes, but what I encountered was both a failure of the medium to capture the qualities in front of me, and more importantly a failure of the scene to meet some prescribed ideals of beauty. I found myself perpetually “correcting” the city within my work. And so I veered into a different manner of description. In the photo and video works entitled “Superficial”, I started with these inescapable gaps and failures, and simply assessed various sites around the city, giving them scores out of hundred. These “marks” (refer to art work) became my preferred use of the landscape mode.

“Marks” should be understood in the double sense of the word:
(1) the act of mark-making or inscription, and (2) assessing and objectifying in the quest for idealism. To document these interventions instantaneously, paint on a canvas proved insufficient. Paint only made its way to the pavement, or the bench, or someone else’s graffiti, and I clicked a photo or took a video. This eventually seemed to be the only way I saw myself possibly making landscape painting, and indeed the only remaining possibility of what landscape painting could be