Shanta Rao — À propos — Slash Paris

Shanta Rao’s work proceeds by accumulating different strata through a mix of different procedures; machines—mechanical/computer—,and the gesture, too, which covers and blurs the machine’s act, and vice versa. An accumulation of signs which invalidates any informative or symbolic message and, despite the remanence of a motif—a building which no longer exists, a military intervention—no more (hi)stories, the image smithereens into grains, scattered pixels and even blotches, and becomes non-functional, and abstracted. An accumulation of planes staggered in space, images of one and the same place but deferred in time, because there is also the issue of dilated time-frames. An accumulation, too, of forms of matter which are crumpled, cleaved, and consumed, and challenge one another on the same medium—silkscreen inks which “play” in opposite directions, thwarting the canvas and the grid of the paper—and colours which mingle to the point of de-activating all recognition, unnameable. Here, despite the accumulation of strata which do not adjust, despite the depletion of signs and matter, something comes across. The materials themselves and a plurality of processes, akin to a geological agglomerate whose complexity is only grasped by way of the cross section, creating their own nature and estabishing their own unity of depth and undivided density of time.