Suchitra Mattai

Roberts Projects is pleased to present Fables, Guineps and the Sweetness of Unknowing, an exhibition of recent works on paper by Suchitra Mattai and her second solo presentation with the gallery. Created with Mattai’s singular approach to collage that blends different traditions of craft and cultural references, the exhibition adopts the literary form of the fable as its organizing structure to consider the enduring resonance of moral tales today.

Drawing on her Indo-Caribbean heritage, Mattai’s multidisciplinary practice employs techniques such as embroidery, needlepoint and beading to create vivid and formally complex works that straddle the line between two- and three-dimensionality. In previous bodies of work, Mattai has made use of representational aesthetics from Indian miniature paintings while also referencing the subject and form of European pastoral landscapes and portraiture. Building upon this creative exploration, these works on paper also examine the history of ornamentation by sourcing examples from 19th-century academic volumes that represent the colonial practice of essentializing diverse cultures and traditions through a set of pictorial conventions. The process of collage allows Mattai to remain connected to the specific histories embedded within her materials—including pieces of embroidery, book pages and fragments of sari tapestries—while also attempting to unify them with new and inventive compositions.

The use of narrative conventions has been central to Mattai’s process of reenvisioning her ancestral legacy, seeing them as repositories of historic meaning that can be reinterpreted and reimagined for the present. Mattai has looked to the history of fables—such as Aesop’s Fables and The Panchatantra in particular—for a conceptual framework to explore how society continues to make use of the character types and morally weighted meanings so often found in these stories. While still evoking the landscapes and architecture of European painting, Mattai’s collages interrupt those spaces and the formal implications they carry. This process of merging representational strategies which invokes a specific tradition of craft and artistry reflects Mattai’s broader project of considering how cultures have influenced one another through periods of migration.

Fables, Guineps and the Sweetness of Unknowing highlights the ongoing significance of collage for Mattai, with each work presenting a rich layering of ideas, textures and materials which convey the infinite curiosity at the heart of her practice. The form of collage itself and its consistent fragmentation of space into different zones of style and technique reflects the artist’s effort to create a visual language—a new ‘future space’—where the regional traditions of her ancestry can be preserved as they contribute to a contemporary consciousness and moral reckoning.