The brief was that the three of us (prashant, aseem and vinit) as a collective (Thoughtattic), along with those who join, will discuss three paintings every month.

Every month we would meet to discuss art, and in it specifically the medium of ‘painting’, in order to understand it, learn from it and if possible even critique it wherever and however required. Each one of us selected one painting each, and studied it in detail and presented our own reading of it, every month. In this process, there was a hope to come across new artworks, discover and understand different artists, techniques and their styles throughout history. Apart from our inexplicable desire to learn and discover new paintings and with them realise new ways of seeing and new conceptions of art, there was no other agenda or intention as such for this exercise. This amusement was just for the sake of absorbing knowledge and producing a discourse and seeing what emerges out of it.

We thought of our ourselves as three dimensions, as if we were like the X, Y and the Z axis, the three geometric axes that provide coordinates for all cartographic space. Aseem being the X, Vinit being the Y and Prashant being the Z axis, coming together to define, map or maybe produce certain positions in space. Possessing different amounts and kinds of energies, intentionalities, ideas, and capacities that hold potentialities to produce our own individual subjectivity, like the 3 axes, each carrying distinct values in 3 different directions, we intented not to converge and meet at an intersection between us (since the only point where all the axes meet, is at zero and zero is just a point, not a space.) but instead, performing our own individualities and extending and stretching our coordinates as far as possible, in our own unique direction. The idea was to meet by divergence and when brought together, to create a three dimensional space of discourse with 3 unique co-ordinates and not just a point.


X (Aseem) in a broader sense was interested in understanding Art as a construct, and incessantly distinguishing the act of Painting from that of Art as such. Through his selection of paintings, he aimed at evoking the questions of authorship / autonomy and analysing mechanisms of Painting as documentary, propaganda, service, activism, indulgence, catharsis or merely pleasure seeking.

Y (Vinit) was keen on investigating the relationship between ‘Painting’ and the aspect of ‘Representation’ - particularly the ways in which the painting transcends, betrays, complies, decieves, overwhelms or complicates Representation. His strategy was to excavate devices, methods or techniques (such as distortion, transfiguration, dysfunctional referencing, recontextualisation, automatism, diagramming, assemblage, etc) from painting that facilitate in their specific ways such a transcendence, finally problematizing clear conceptualisations of the Image.

Z (Prashant) speaks of the relationships between Architecture and Society, the Built scape and the people inhabiting it, represented in Paintings. He will be working on various scales (City, Landscape, Building, Interiority, etc) and exploring the spatiality in relation to the human body or the subject present in the painting by placing emphasis on techniques such as one point perspective, framing, light and shadow, layering and patterns.


We held 8 sessions in total over the many years, with long self reflective pauses, to arrive at a set of 8 paintings each, so far. Each selected painting was one which we found most interesting or closest to our own self, our ideas, intuitions or interest, at that moment in time.