In this Nothingness, Everything Vipta Kapadia’s long lasting engagement with painting in this solo show is an intricate part of her journey from the distance travelled to the distances yet to be traveled. Vipta intervenes her familiar idiom with her new enquiries on form and content relationships. Seemingly similar engagements open up new enquiries each time, as she stops and thinks about her language while continuing to exploit her known dictum. Here, Vipta explores the nature of relationship between form and content with a newly established bond between the nature of thoughts and its impact on human body. As they appear and reappear leaving no identifiable substance, yet straining chaos and identifying human subsistence as the core. This suite of paintings emerge from the desire to interrogate nothingness once again. Knowing no names to address a person, pathway, town, city, place, country or a thing; Vipta questions how a language evolves on its own. It is the Freudian ‘id’ factor that intervenes the ‘superego’ in her interrogation of the form content relationship this time. Vipta beautifully establishes a contact with the moral side of human mind that is inclusive of pain, exactly like the pleasure component, thus touching her somatic representation of ‘ego’ from where the individual’s language takes birth. Her paintings as if introduce a somatic structure (mind) that has fluid and visceral spaces wherein thoughts appear and reappear to confine the body gestures into meaningful substance, which eventually supply content to her imagination. This forms the premise of the entering her painstakingly and patiently conceived suite in this solo show. Vipta’s large paintings (Untitled 1 and Untitled 2) in their embodiment of the grey and the green hues suggest hazy appearances of- say, kaput human feelings and a torso, only to transcend these identifications and educe an expression of fulfillment. This transience from mutation of ‘form’ itself into a fluid content wherein description of body, object, place or a thing is pulverized, is enormously occupying sap that forms her language. The large Blue canvas that leaves an impression of eroded wall is again contained within herself, who as a benign and calm being interrogates the cities and places with her meditative silence. Thoughts that appear and reappear, yet observed with a distance, not reacted upon, resolve Vipta’s language as addressing a consistent dictum that is non-violence. Vipta’s small paintings all untitled emerge from her focus on absent power between human intellect and the acquired knowledge. Volatile representations of sofas and books indicate a converse aesthetic in the dialogues between people who presumably have just left. Their inner chaos and tearing mental distances acquire the spaces of silent interrogation in Vipta’s paintings. Vipta is that distant observer of these dialogues who listens to the silence of the left behind objects- the sofas and the books. From within chaos within; and converse dialogues must emerge a pathway that leads one towards self-knowledge. In consequence, Vipta identifies the layered human struggle to comment upon ‘ignorance’ which the books propounding ‘pure knowledge’ may not yield. Vipta’s consistent dictum to address non-violence is in her silence towards the world that speeded up towards high success termed as competition. Vipta’s other small works wherein she lets the chaos wash out between two shifting vertical planes suggests her mental configuration of the construction waste which is urban. In every possible way, and seemingly repetitive engagements through her silence Vipta addresses non-violence as a strategy to observe the world.- Shubhalakshmi Shukla Mumbai based, Free Lance writer