“A Soliloquist’s Journal is like a record of my inner conversations,” says artist Rinku Choudhary. Her solo exhibition of the same name is currently on view at Triveni Kala Sangam. Curated by Prima Kurien and presented by Art Incept, the show remains on view until September 9.
A soliloquy is a speech in which a character speaks aloud to themselves, revealing private thoughts, doubts or plans. For Choudhary, painting becomes a similar act of introspection — a way of responding to herself. “I am constantly observing, remembering, questioning and responding to things within me,” she says.
The exhibition brings together a body of paintings that explores memory, domesticity, identity and the quiet repetition of emotions that shape everyday life. Home, for Choudhary, is not simply a physical space populated by familiar domestic objects but a repository of relationships, habits, conflicts, affection and memories. “Through these spaces, figures and objects, I explore how our surroundings and relationships shape our sense of identity,” she says.
In that sense, the works come together like fragments of the artist herself — “pages from a journal, where some things are clear and others remain unresolved”. “The works have developed slowly through different experiences, memories and emotions rather than from one fixed idea,” she adds.
Her experience of growing up in a joint family also finds its way into this visual language. Being constantly surrounded by people, voices, relationships and shifting emotions created, as she describes it, “a strong sense of togetherness, but also very little sense of being completely alone”.
That tension appears across her canvases: crowded spaces, overlapping and entangled figures, rabbits, dogs and cats, disembodied hands, beds and chairs, and moments that suggest either intimacy or distance between people. “Sometimes a very ordinary domestic object can bring back an entire feeling or memory for me,” she says. “Chairs are familiar objects from the home, but I also see them as places of waiting, rest, absence and presence. The scattered marks come from the process of remembering itself; memories are rarely complete or arranged neatly.”
Birds, too, occasionally appear in her canvases, carrying ideas of freedom and escape. “At times they can also feel like observers present within the domestic world but not completely belonging to it,” she adds.
Her canvases are animated by pinks, faded and vivid greens, browns and reds, alongside dots and patches, with lines that weave and tangle across figures and spaces. Alongside painting, she incorporates mixed-media elements, including pieces of paper and fragments that are pasted onto the surface. These gestures become another way of processing and responding to her inner world. “A colour can create a feeling of warmth, discomfort or restlessness, while marks and gestures can carry a kind of energy that words cannot,” she says.
Choudhary completed her MFA in Painting at the College of Art, New Delhi, in 2018. Nearly a decade into her formal practice, she feels her work has become more receptive and open, moving beyond a purely inward gaze. “Earlier, I was more focused on my own inner world and personal experiences. Now, I am also interested in the relationship between the inner and the outer world, how our surroundings, relationships and everyday experiences enter our inner lives. I am more comfortable allowing different layers...”,” she says. “I am more comfortable allowing different layers and meanings to exist together and letting the work develop through that dialogue between what is within us and what surrounds us.”