What Patience Reveals: Oil Works of Transition

Drawn by a poster or an invitation – whether by its title or its visual promise – an art lover steps into a gallery, where a set of artworks spark curiosity, desire, or even resistance. Inevitably or eventually, the viewer may wonder: why did the artist choose this medium to express the image? The answer may be practical, even economic, or it may be conceptual, philosophical.

For many, painting is synonymous with oil on canvas. Other familiar mediums include watercolour, celebrated for its capacity to channel exuberant energy through swift brushstrokes, and acrylic, often regarded as oil’s practical substitute – precise, efficient, bold, capable of producing vibrant surfaces with sharp, unyielding edges.

Oil, however, remains singular. Pigments suspended in a drying oil binder cure slowly, through gradual oxidation that can take days or weeks. This very slowness grants the artist the opportunity of time – a space to reflect, to blend, to refine. It enables infinite gradations of colour, subtle transitions, and meticulous detail in pursuit of realism. Layer upon layer, oils acquire richness through depth, softness, and texture, reaching outward to interact with the viewer. Yet the same temporality that empowers experimentation also delays completion, holding back the work from readiness, frustrating both the maker and the viewer.

It is fitting, then, that this exhibition turns to time as its central concern. The artists here approach temporality in divergent, sometimes contradictory ways. Anoop Panicker explores nonlinear time as an abstract, subjective condition, while Neeraj Singh Khandka charts its forward march, bridging nostalgia for a vanished childhood with the inevitability of mortality. Raka Panda interrupts time, freezing fleeting moments that call attention to present rather than to past or future. Golak Khandual preserves time in the moment and perpetuity through portraiture – gazes and expressions suspended between memory, repetition, and anticipation. By contrast, self-drawings by Gautam Rahul dwell not on an instant but on transition itself, unfolding revelation through deliberate process. And in Dipin Chandran’s work, time surfaces less as theme than as practice – his experiments in medium, form, and scale marking an early stage in an evolving trajectory.

In the works of this exhibition, oil becomes time made visible: patient in its making, infinite in its endurance, and luminous in its promise to outlast the moment of its birth. To paint in oil is to accept waiting as intrinsic to the process. It holds permanence, its capacity for blending evokes continuity, and its layering mirrors memory’s sediment.

“….When he is quiet and collected, he paints in oils,

when an impulse seizes him then it is watercolours…..”

Partha Chatterjee in observance of B C Sanyal’s practice