Rupa Bheda Mirrors Neerja Peters’ Artistic Metamorphosis

NEW DELHI:
As a schoolgirl, Neerja Peters found joy in solving mathematical problems while her classmates sought leisure at the playground. Years later as a mother, the same formulae enabled her to help her two children doing homework. Math being a “form of play” went on to prompt Neerja to try a hand at visual art, where she impulsively introduced abstract geometry.

Today, Neerja Chandna Peters is holding her first-ever solo exhibition of paintings in the country — at the national capital, where she lives. The five-day ‘Rupa Bheda’ at Bikaner House near India Gate features 80 her recent works, curated by scholar-historian Uma Nair.

Math wasn’t Neerja’s sole passion as a teenager in the mid-1980s. “I was drawn to philosophy and the profound wisdom in our scriptures. That led me to write poetry,” recalls the artist, who was a medical practitioner. “At 14, I composed a poem that explored the search for our creator. My young mind wondered whether physics, metaphysics, mathematics or philosophy will lead me to find the answers.”

Crucially, art became the eventual bridge for Neerja, uniting the logic of mathematics with the depth of her inner inquiries. “I found the collaborative interplay of geometry and colour to be deeply contemplative,” she points out from the experience of constant brush with paintings for one-and-a-half decades now. From the age of 40, “creating these works became both a spiritual journey and a daily practice”.

A trained doctor who took to painting while raising her son and daughter, Chandigarh-born Neerja’s branching out from writing poetry triggered a celebration of hues with mathematical precision. A self-taught artist, the pandemic years from 2020 kept her particularly busy by participating in 500 shows (both online and offline), besides two solos in the US and one at an art museum in Australia.

At the current ‘Rupa Bheda’, curator Uma Nair notes that Neerja’s works, which are made up of simple shapes and painterly contours, allude to the transcendental world steeped in beguiling sense of colour and delicate surfaces. “They revel in representational imageries that are poetic. Sometimes mysterious at otherwise rigorously formal, the paintings are angled at the many facets of meditation,” adds Nair, a Delhiite with familial roots in Kerala’s lush-green Kuttanad belt known as the rice-bowl of the southern state.

Neerja’s paintings, for instance, has a section on Mandalas, featuring densely-layered and finely-textured meditations on nature. “Here, her approach is more intuitive than impulsive,” notes the curator, emphasising the capacity of the paintings to bring complex compositions to life. Another segment carries a suite of works that brings to the viewer a closer understanding of abstraction and cubism as important allies. “It is also affirms that cubism is essentially an art that seeks to understand our perception of physical reality,” the curator says at the February 20-25 ‘Rupa Bheda’ which was inaugurated by veteran filmmaker Muzaffar Ali, also an author-painter.

Neerja’s interest in exploring time as a universal element that can only be experienced has led her towards her minimalist monochromes on rice paper. Further, her ‘Cosmic’ series, created on small black sheets of paper, are forged in an impressively vital, sculptural and volumetric presence for the forms, lines, and abstract idioms in space.

For Neerja, a gold medallist from Christian Medical College at Ludhiana in Punjab, abstraction is more than a mere trajectory. “There is an artist for every age,” notes Uma Nair. “As for ‘Rupa Bheda’, the most noticeable character of Neerja’s contemporary works is the balance of proportion between the upper left and right regions along with the recurring geometric repetitions. “They remind the viewer that the painting is literally a flat surface and even its shallow planar space is an illusion,” she adds.