Ask artist Nabendra Limbu about his painting process and he’ll give you a detailed rundown—from canvas stretching to the final layer of paint—as if he is talking about life incidents. He talks about colour and their placement in his canvases as if he is talking about people in his life, his relationship with them and the connections that were made. The canvas, which he likes to call his periphery, is a space in which his experiences reside. Such is Limbus’s relationship with his body of work—his abstract paintings are his way of reflecting on a transcendent world and all the while a means to put into physicality the way he feels and experiences.

More than 200 paintings—ranging from the size of 5X8 inches to 6X8 feet—by Limbu are currently on display at the Nepal Art Council, Babarmahal. Created in the span of 14 years, the exhibition is Limbu’s second solo show and is titled Samaahit (Embraced). It picks up from where his earlier body of work, titled Rhythmic Existential Relationship, which was exhibited in NAFA, Naxal, in 2003, left off. The exhibition saw an informal opening on August 27.

“I advised him to do an official opening, but he said too many people would come see the show at once, and that he wouldn’t be able to make time for everybody,” says Limbu’s friend and exhibition curator Sujan Chitrakar. “He says he wants to be available in the gallery for people to come talk to.”

Limbu is in the gallery every day of the exhibition, talking to visitors. The decision to shy away from an “invite-everybody” opening seems fitting as a whole lot can be gained through talking to the artist in person, who very meticulously chooses words to explain his works and his thought processes. This I realised when I made an appointment with the artist in the gallery itself. The artist doesn’t give away too much and is not at all literal in his explanations. And, after an artist-led tour around the space, I actually found another round of observing the paintings to be more rewarding.

Evolving Abstraction

It is integral for a viewer to take a look at Limbu’s earlier body of work to actually appreciate the stage that his current works are in. The 2003 exhibition featured what Limbu likes to call semi-abstract works, which are composed of geometric shapes (resembling pieces of jigsaw puzzles, or computer generated pixels); on close observation they turn into still-lives or landscapes, of which both the colour and the form have been simplified. The idea of maintained relationships between the forms is central to this series of his. Relationships are themes that he is still exploring in his works.

Unlike his earlier works, though, which featured a number of colours, most of his recent paintings now only consist of three different hues.

“I start with a brush to paint a flat background which is white or black,” says Limbu. “Then using a squeegee, I go on to paint the next two layers.” Limbu’s experimentations with other coloured backgrounds can also be seen in the exhibition. For him, the choice of background comes from a more painterly intention—the idea is to be able to separate the background from the foreground.

The next two layers on the canvas are vertical and horizontal blocks/lines that intersect one another, creating a maze-like structure. These structures lack any intended signs of figurative representation, but viewers are free to imagine. Looking at it from the artist’s perspective, he is transcribing something already abstract, like a stream of emotions, so it lacks that representational basis. The creator’s attention is diverted to other things like the colours that are juxtaposed with one another (In recent works, two colors run parallel in the foreground. These are almost always complimentary but are of similar intensities), the way the negative and the positive plains co-exist and how these colours and forms indicate emotions or life experiences.

Backgrounds and White

“I tried painting without priming the canvas once because I thought even the white in the background could indicate something. But then I thought the paintings went on to look too sculptural without a background hue,” says Limbu, slowly running his fingers through one of the paintings in a sub-series titled Spontaneous Acceptance. “I think a white background helps separate colours really well. And for colours like ghee white (beige/off white), I prefer a black background.”

The use of white is a prominent attribute of his paintings. When not applied as background, white comes mixed with foreground colours making the hues seem more pastel-like. With the help of white, the colours lose their original intensity to sit better with the complimentary hues that they are applied alongside.

“Mixing white gives colours an airy quality, making them seem as if they are floating,” says Limbu. “Just like emotions.”

Two-in-one

“If you make a grayscale copy of his paintings in the computer, the two colours in the foreground actually become of one tone,” says Sujan Chitrakar, who also helped with the branding of the exhibition.

Judging by the way Limbu approaches his artistic practice, this seems like a planned move as the use of two and the relationships they maintain are integral to what he is trying to convey.

“When I fell in love, I realised the importance of two. An emotion is worthless if it is just a one-way experience,” says Limbu. For him, the paintings are a byproduct of emotions born out of such two-way interactions. And the artist’s attempts lie in further translating these emotions such that they start taking up a formless state; into something that lacks any concrete, decipherable element. “It’s two-in-one. These are two separate colours working as one.”

After the conversation with the artist, I sit down on one of the artist-designed benches installed in the gallery and run my eyes across the blue and purple and white of one of the paintings. I look on, sometimes trying to make sense of the forms and other times following the blue and purple in the foreground; the two run alongside one another, ascending and descending, moving across as they please. And it is only a matter of time before my mind seizes to consider the two colours as foreground; the focus shifts to white before eventually coming back to the colours again. As the negative and the positive space in the canvas interchange for me, I think about the example Limbu had given me only about an hour prior: “Everything in the world relates to one another. Just like how this exhibition has created a connection between you and me.”

I start pondering on how, if we could decipher emotions, they would inflate and deflate, move about quickly and retard, and merge and separate with other emotions, just like colours and forms in Limbu’s paintings do. And eventually, I come in terms with the fact that trying to comprehend everything does not even matter. I look on for a while more and accept the colours and forms for what they are, and make nothing more of them. The band together and create a world of their own. 

The exhibition runs until September 3.