"Corpuscles"

Describing Pooja Gupta's paintings isn't as simple as placing her into this or that genre or one style which is mutually exclusive with another. She paints figures - many times using herself as the model - yet they're not some third person pedestal pap. She paints landscapes as well, but it's not the hackneyed scenery of some bargain-bin mall boutique that peddles claptrap for suburban adornment. Gupta's paintings are impressionistic somatoscapes that recreate the site of the body as the site of place, or rather that amplify the body until it is like place, an analogy.

Gupta's figures fill the canvas and expand past its boundaries. They are unmistakably female forms, but they do not inhabit a world of one-to-one correspondence with ours. Instead these landscapes are populated by cell-like shapes, membranous bits that flit about and fill up the negative space. In this strange way, her work details both the internal and the external at the same time: the outward body and that inner stuff, a solid figure and a hazy impression.

-Andrew Beckerman