Kings of Chelsea – Roberto Cavalli Interiors commissioned Narielwalla to make a series of works for their showroom on Kings Road, London. For this new series of works, he has focused his research onto the movement of dancers and the influence the medium of dance has had on 20th century artists such as Picasso, Picabia and Francis Bacon. Within contemporary dance of the Contact Improvisation school of thought, choreographer Steve Paxton proposes that dancers “meditate upon the physical laws relating to their masses: gravity, momentum, inertia, and friction. They do not strive to achieve results, but rather, to meet the constantly changing physical reality with appropriate placement and energy.”
Tracing the instructive points and lines of Narielwalla’s patterns leads our eye to the blocked planes of applied colour- a trajectory in keeping with Wassily Kandinsky’s early theories on abstraction “Point and Line to Plane”. Points are fixed moments, lines are emotive traces of a journey, and planes are hovering forms that oscillate in space. These compositional tools take flat, two-dimensional elements, and create evocations of three-dimensional movement experienced in time. Picasso and Braque’s early experiments into cubism were not so much about departing from depictions of reality but in fact showing to us that we see the world in fleeting visions at differing perspectives all at once – a new real.
Narielwalla shows us that the body is a constantly changing form expressed through the fashion we adorn, the movements we make and the colours and moods we reflect. This new body of work focuses on the sense of constant flux we experience in the contemporary moment and acknowledges that to make sense of a present that is constantly changing we should respect a past that is confined to history. These works trace, map and touch compositions for the body as imagined by the designers of their day but choreograph new destinations through lyrical forms that dance across the surface of antiqued paper. They remind us that, in a world that can seem hostile and divided, our bodies and the ways they navigate this shifting landscape, remain shared and universal.
To read an interview visit https://www.kofc.co.uk/2020/03/31/hello-world/