The paintings and drawings of Aji VN serve as visual chronographs marking his journeys across diurnal and transcendental time, but also as compasses exploring the possibilities of the world. I am struck by how the same painted scene folds many orders of time in states of intimacy and reliance—the geological time of rocks, the lifespan of foliage which will leave its trace on the rocks, the sea as the most ancient, ancestral matter we know, the celestial formations dotted above.

The hours of light and darkness, the view of horizon, verdant landscapes—the paintings condense the span of days, months, years within their frame, sedimenting layers of paint as chapters of accumulated hours spent at the ever-renewing shoreline or gazing from the window of a temporary studio.

Reflexive to the vastness of these paintings is the furtive intensity of drawings that relay an inhabited moment with a sense of immediacy. Here, we encounter the texture of terraqueous sites, boulders as capsules of deep time, and explorations of finite moments. Shifting between the unknowable and intimately held, there are small portraits of Aji’s daughter, often with her gaze turned elsewhere or presented in an oblique profile that retains the quality of immersion and inwardness of the natural world—at once with us and somewhere beyond.

(Text by Arushi Vats)