nteracting with the latest paintings of Arpita Singh is like reliving the experience of being stuck in an aeroplane (for eight to 12 hours), bound from some Asian terminal to a European destination. Flying over several countries, you glimpse tracts of land out of a window or on the small screen in front of your seat. You can imagine the spread of languages and dialects across borders, regions, countries, provinces, districts down those unfamiliar and unseen territories. The sensation is not different from sitting at an international airport, such as Dubai, Heathrow or Istanbul, of innumerable connecting flights; and hearing almost every language – from Hebrew to Hausa, Czech, Chinese, Kannada, Creole, Malayalam, Macedonian, Icelandic etc.

During the journey, a passenger may leaf through the airline’s promotional material, informing one about its routes across the continents. There are long and leaning arrows that join one small or insignificant cities of the Global South to a mega metropolis of the First World and vice versa. A great feature of these diagrams is their inclusivity beyond economic, political or social disparities. Thus, the place of origin, say Addis Ababa, becomes the point of arrival on the return flight from Toronto. In that sense, all cities are equally important, relevant and longed for.

These aeroplanes create a network in the sky. In the same way, travellers inside these metal capsules converse with one another, bridging national, ethnic, religious, gender, age barriers. In Arpita Singh’s paintings, recently displayed by Vadehra Art Gallery at Frieze, No 9, Cork Street, London (June 2-17), one could detect passages of spoken words, linking human beings through language, written, spoken or recognised.

Language, by its nature, is a bond, a pathway. As an immigrant, you might eavesdrop on someone speaking your mother tongue on a train commute and start ‘understanding’ the person (and yearn to talk to the stranger). Language, like roads, rail tracks, air-routes, join people from various places. Observed in a physical form at Singh’s exhibition, Meeting, which consisted of paintings in oil on canvas, works in ink, and watercolours on paper. The show was the first solo exhibition by Singh in London. This is surprising, considering Arpita Singh, born in 1937 in Kolkata, is much admired and hugely regarded for her unique and superb vocabulary, and has exhibited at many museums and international venues including Tokyo, Madrid, Paris, Boston and Bern along with several biennales and triennials.

Meeting her in India in 1992, I and my colleagues from Lahore, has spotted purity, honesty and emotional depth of the painter, who was surrounded by her celebrated painter spouse (Prem Singh) and the brilliant artist daughter (Anjum Singh 1967-2020). She remained a humble individual. Some artists and authors are more interested in their work than glamourising or projecting their lives (Milan Kundera is one example). Some of them may appear regular characters: office workers, house wives, slogging in their small jobs, tongue tied, recluse; but when they create they become different, grand and superior beings.

Arpita Singh is one of the latter kind. I have been following her art for 30 years. In every exhibition, or series of works, Singh surprises us with her power of imagination. Her chosen idiom could be compared to Indian artists who blend the pictorial elements of Indian miniature paintings, local folk art and naïve imagery to concoct a vocabulary that looks contemporary as well as indigenous. Somnath Hore’s sculptures and KG Subramanyan’s paintings were derived from the aesthetics of Indian rural or popular art, but these also incorporated Art Brut (a movement mostly associated with Jean Dubuffet).

In Singh’s paintings, the language – in the form of overlapped and interconnecting stripes – substitutes the real settings.

Arpita Singh’s diction is connected to that convention, but not confined to it. Singh extends the pictorial substance for a personal and private narrative. In her work, a viewer enjoys the painterly quality, but the visual components serve to build a supra-story. As we know, stories travel on the chariots of words. In three paintings - titled You Will or You Will Not; If You Only Let Me; and Star, Moon and Two Different Skies - the artist has created the cartography of spoken words/ worlds. Painted as fabulously as any canvas by Singh – these suggest the shores of a different world: demarcation of a planet, not based on location, but the discourse.

Years ago, as a young student in the UK, the first paperback I got was the London AZ, a practical bible to survive in the metropolis, delineating each lane, alley, mews, street, borough, zone. The map, a great help in one’s daily chores, also betrayed another fact: that no human would be there, or prepared to help one find their way around the complex city – but this small volume.

Whereas in India, and in Pakistan too, people – despite digital maps, still prefer to consult passers-by, shop owners, even policemen, to ask for directions; and often resulting in confusion, contradictions, misinformation, and a waste of time. Yet, the act of talking to another human about the journey reaffirms the notion that all of us are travellers in one way or another, even though lost at some point; and in order to reorient ourselves we need to speak to other beings.

In Singh’s paintings, particularly If You Only Let Me, the plan/ plane of the picture is paved with words, phrases, lines, segments of speech– ephemeral entities, which could create a distance, more lasting and crucial than the physical miles. It is a map that does not indicate streets or neighbourhoods, but documents the conversations between fellow wanderers on a pathway. A patch of land, that could be between a green park, the sea, or in-between (like, Star, Moon and Two Different Skies); or contain a whirlwind of dark forms amid bursting blues and specks of vibrant vermilions.

Arpita Singh, rendering exquisite surfaces while dealing with primitive/ simplified characters – though with profound concepts – has added the layout of a language’s movement: broken, half-uttered, repeated or incomprehensible. One realises that the language is the main motif and the point of reference/ departure for Singh. One may find identifiable text, but it feels that more than deciphering each letter and line, her imagery is about the capacity of language as a binding phenomenon between the alienated members of a society.

Artists like Arpita Singh who employ the diction of naïve/untrained art, also inculcate literary and philosophical references in their discourse. There is nothing more dense, difficult and complex than Jean Dubuffet’s small book Asphyxiating Culture and Other Writings (1988), and to some extent KG Subramanyan’s publications, Moving Focus (1978), The Living Tradition (1987), The Creative Circuit (1992), but whenever a visitor confronts the painting of a Dubuffet, a Subramanyan, a Cy Twombly, a Jean-Michel Basquiat, he/ she seems to be at home because he/ she can associate with the lingo that lies outside the domain of high/ exclusive art.

Words are similar to visuals, which do not replicate our optical encounters, but remind us of a distant, disinterested, often a disconnected recollection. In Arpita Singh’s paintings, the language – in the form of overlapped and interconnecting stripes – substitutes the real settings. Viewing her work is a way of knowing how human beings, their utterances, their locations (and their emotions) could be as intermingled as the painterly construction of Arpita Singh’s canvases.

The writer is an art critic based in Lahore .