IN THE GARDEN OF DREAMS AND DESIRES
Lalitha Lajmi
Anant Art Gallery, 2006
Catalogue Essay: Ranjit Hoskote
In her recent paintings, Lalitha Lajmi pursues the longstanding preoccupation that has distinguished her art for four decades: the fate of the female protagonist. Premised on the self-portrait but extending itself to include other women, familiar and fictive, Lajmi’s female figure occupies a space that is compounded from the domestic interior and the magical andscape, a space in which traces of carpet and tiled floor coexist with hillside and sky. A lingering tristesse may haunt the edges of these watercolours, but their heroine is no longer marginal, tentative or uncertain of her purpose. On the contrary, she is serene in the face of psychic and historical turbulence, confident of a place in life’s admittedly capricious scheme. The silence of claustrophobia has been replaced by the resonance of music.
(excerpt from the catalogue essay ‘In the Garden of Dreams and Desires: Recent Paintings by Lalitha Lajmi’ by Ranjit Hoskote)