PARIS.- Bharti Kher’s exhibition has an accordion like effect, taking the viewer on different registers. The effect is much like her vast studio in Gurgaon where objects lie in grand chaos, and the mood seems to shift on different floors. The range of materials confounds, because of the alchemical magic that she seems to tease and seduce from odd conjunctions and unfamiliar disparities.

There’s nothing seemingly extraordinary about the figures in the sculpture, “Six Women”. Frontally nude, and seated, the contours of their breasts and stomachs nestle in mutual comfort, like the folds of time. Their bodies reveal few secrets. Kher has chosen the studio artist’s compact with his model of 19th century France, of the female nude, and the complex arrangements around the choice of model. Appropriately, she creates for her exhibition in Paris the prostitute as model – a popular subject in French academic painting, and a motif of the French Belle Epoque.

Kher’s figures have neither the ambiguity of romance nor the promise of pleasure and favoured haunts that excited the imagination of the 19th century artist. Unlike the “magical brightness of gas lamps” that Gustave Flaubert wrote of as the ideal setting for the prostitute, Kher presents her figures in the harsh reality of daylight. She identifies and draws her figures from Sonagachi in Kolkata, which translates from Bengali as tree of gold, South Asia’s largest area for pleasure seekers. Her treatment of the nude derives from a body cast for each figure – and speaks of the act of trust and intimacy that lies at the core of the practice.

Kher extends a more psychological dimension to another portrait. This is the face cast of her mother, “The half spectral thing”. Laid on its side, the features somewhat obscured, the work does not quite belong to the genre of artist’s mothers portraits. Rather, rendered as homage and somewhat ghost like, separated or severed from the body, the facial cast comes in the line of her recent enquiry into casting the body as memory, and the mind as the seat of emotion. Seen in context with the “Six Women”, this work puts the onus on the older female body, and its summation of experience as a subject of study.

For some years Kher has been working with what she speaks of as double sided cabinet forms. Comprising free standing frames in heavy wood, these present a ground for the most radical work that she is now attempting with the bindi. As a dot of ornamentation worn by women in the subcontinent, she has turned it into a mark that can assume a dynamic, painterly effect and a personal language. “The Betrayal of Causes Once Held Dear” sees the bindi as vast painted surfaces playing host to cosmic forms as they appear to spin in orbit.

In these large reflective works, Kher extends her interest in translucency, the mirror surfaces and the body. She refers to these as “obelisk bodies that carry the seven epidermal layers of skin and memory”. On the verso she introduces a new material, wax, which touches on the makings of alchemy and transformation. Christian poetry and Biblical metaphor are rich in reference to the act of purification through burning and the separation of the dross and the gold. Kher opts for the more humble material wax, the only element which recoups its original form even after heating and cooling. Here her work recalls Cy Twombly – in the relationship between word and image, drawing and the effect of a dripping surface, the “ecstasy and insanity” that Twombly spoke of.

Kher complicates the bindi works by making them repositories of desire through the use of a highly personal language. In “What Can I Tell You That You Don’t Know Already?” (2013) - mirrors, bindis and stainless steel are like landscapes, pressed flowers, and memory fields. Using the black dot/bindi, Kher also creates minimal, illusionistic abstract fields with “Heroides V” and “Heroides VII”. The reference to Heroides is to the letters of classical heroines in Ovid written by neglected or abandoned heroines to their lovers ; the women of Lesbos, Dido, Phyllis and Penelope are all believed to be the subject of the Heroides. Kher’s interest in classical mythology both Indian and European has lain at the core of her work, rendering it both autobiography and personal.

With this exhibition Kher moves from the more graphic content of her sculptures of the past, to an increasingly sophisticated engagement with a larger world of meaning and material. The seemingly modest work “Index”, of mark making, draws upon a global atlas where each city is systematically eroded, blackened out, rendered blind. In the silence that now emerges Kher works to create a new language for decoding maps. This engagement with the line continues in a series of drawings.

Kher calls the present series on view “Alchemy Drawings”. Drawn on old French ledgers, they anticipate the arc of movement and balance that the drawings share with her recent sculptures. With “Equilibrium”, a set of three triangles, the artist draws us into impossible worlds: on one side of the coin there is mythmaking, and on the other, existential failure. The idea of the Impossible Triangle or the Penrose tribar becomes a symbol for contradictory beliefs, the notion of paradox, like a failed utopia. Entertaining the idea of equilibrium, she extends it to three other works that incorporate found pieces, all arranged in singular acts of balance. (“When darkness becomes light”, “Still Life” … )

In an artist like Kher, who’s oeuvre may appear like simultaneous conversations within the same room, the question of balance is vital.

The engagement with balance teases out the idea of equilibrium: Kher seems as preoccupied with the equilibrium of physical forces, as psychological. She achieves a ‘steady state’ by a surreal conjunction of elements. Drawn from found objects these works are strange and tantalizing disparate forms – all held together in a delicate precarious balance.

Kher’s working process – of allusion, deflections and a personally encoded language plays through this body of work. Drawing, erasures, sculpture, bindi and encaustic forms, together what do they amount to? That the Heroides may be imprinted, gently, within the bindis, and entire maps erased and reconfigured speaks of the language of art making and its mystery. Here Kher seems to find pleasure , in drawing out the power and suggestibility of her materials. What she offers at the end, as you patiently decode her language, is the first glimpse at a self portrait. Etched between the bindis, and only faint in outline, the artist-auteur looks out at you. Now the conversation may begin.