Listen to me carefully, you bunch of snobs: Atul Dodiya shatters our certainties with the delicacy of a burglar who would be doing you a favor by reorganizing your living room. This artist from Mumbai does not just paint; he performs surgical operations on the history of art, suturing Picasso to Gandhi, grafting Bollywood onto Piero della Francesca with the quiet audacity of a doctor who knows exactly where to plant his scalpel.
From his studio in Ghatkopar, in this Mumbai that digests its contradictions daily like an oversized stomach, Dodiya creates images that speak to us about ourselves with troubling precision. His canvases are not mere painted surfaces, but territories where the ghosts of our time meet. When he transposes his wife Anju in the style of Fayoum portraits, it is not an studio affectation, but a meditation on the persistence of love through the centuries.
The artist’s training in Paris, that year 1991-1992 spent at the École des Beaux-Arts, functions like a chemical revelator in his work. Confronted for the first time with the originals of his masters, Dodiya understands that art is not a monotheistic religion but a generous syncretism. This revelation transforms his practice into an active archaeology of the present, where each layer of meaning reveals a different temporal stratum.
The unconscious as a workshop: When psychoanalysis illuminates creation
The relationship between Dodiya’s art and the mechanisms of the unconscious reveals a fascinating proximity to Freud’s discoveries about the construction of memory [1]. As Freud had intuited as early as 1910 in his analysis of Leonardo da Vinci, the artist operates through condensation and displacement, the two fundamental mechanisms that psychoanalysis has identified in the work of dreams. In Dodiya, this operation becomes manifest in his “Girlfriends” series, where the faces of ancient masters are superimposed onto contemporary features in a process that evokes the formation of screen memories.
The artist proceeds through visual free associations, assembling seemingly disparate elements that reveal, upon analysis, a deep coherence. His installation cabinets, notably the “Broken Branches” series created after the 2002 Gujarat riots, function as analysis chambers where objects dialogue with each other according to a logic that is not that of rational consciousness. Each element, yellowed photograph, textile fragment, painted quote, acts as a signifier that refers to other signifiers in an infinite associative chain.
This method recalls the technique of free-floating attention dear to psychoanalysts, where listening does not focus on any particular element to allow unexpected connections to emerge. Dodiya practices a visual free-floating attention, collecting images, objects and references without a pre-established hierarchy, allowing rapprochements to occur according to an unconscious logic. His canvases then become places of revelation where the cultural and personal repressed returns in plastic form.
The recurrent use of the portrait in his work is also illuminated from a psychoanalytic angle. The portrait, in Dodiya’s work, is never simple representation but always displacement. When he paints Bindu in the style of Sayed Haider Raza, he performs a temporal condensation that reveals the hidden links between popular icon and pictorial avant-garde. This operation of displacement allows the Indian collective unconscious to express itself through apparently anodyne forms.
Repetition, another central mechanism of the unconscious, deeply structures Dodiya’s practice. His series, whether they are metal shutters or miniature landscapes, function as variations on an obsessive theme, revealing through their differences the latent contents that underlie the work. This compulsion to repeat, which Freud had identified as beyond the pleasure principle, becomes for the artist a tool for exploring the Indian cultural unconscious.
The particular temporality of his works also evokes the Freudian conception of deferred action, where a past event takes on meaning only in the light of a later experience. The references to European art in Dodiya’s work only function fully when illuminated by his Parisian experience of 1991-1992, just as his evocations of Gandhi only reveal their urgency after the traumatic experience of the communal riots.
Architecture of memory: Space as a temporal manuscript
Dodiya’s work reveals an intuitive understanding of architecture as a mnemonic support, a concept already developed by the ancient rhetoricians, these professors of oratory art, in their art of memory [2]. His installations function as contemporary “memory palaces,” where each element occupies a strategic position in the general economy of remembrance. This approach finds its most evident manifestation in his famous metal shutters, those corrugated surfaces that transform the act of painting into a negotiation with the architectural constraint.
The shutter, an element of vernacular architecture in Indian bazaars, becomes under Dodiya’s brush a stratified urban testimony. Like those medieval manuscripts where several texts are superimposed on the same parchment, the artist’s shutters simultaneously bear several temporalities: that of their original commercial function, that of their artistic diversion, and that of the images they support. This temporal stratification directly evokes André Corboz’s theories on territory as palimpsest, where each era leaves its traces without completely erasing the previous ones.
Architecture in Dodiya’s work is not limited to constructed elements but extends to the very structuring of pictorial space. His compositions proceed by zones and compartments, creating internal architectures that evoke sometimes Mughal miniatures, sometimes Gothic polyptychs. This modular approach allows him to juxtapose heterogeneous temporalities without hierarchizing them, reproducing the very logic of the Indian city where millennial temples and ultra-modern shopping centers coexist without a solution of continuity.
The notion of threshold, central in architecture, finds in Dodiya a particularly rich plastic translation. His glass cabinets function as temporal thresholds, allowing passage between the spectator’s space and that of memory. These devices evoke medieval reliquaries, miniature architectures designed to make the absent present, to actualize the past in the instant of contemplation.
The use of photographs in his installations reveals another architectural dimension of his work. These images, often taken in European or American museums, capture not only the works but their architectural environment: the gilded frames, the walls, the play of shadow and light. Dodiya understands that museum architecture fully participates in the meaning of the work, that it constitutes an active element of its reception. By transposing these fragments of institutional architecture into his own compositions, he operates a subtle critique of the global cultural geography.
The question of scale, fundamental in architecture, runs through all of Dodiya’s work. His “baby shutters”, miniaturized versions of his large shutters, question our relationship to monumentality and intimacy. This variation in scale is not a mere formal exercise but interrogates the conditions of art reception in a world where digital reproduction has abolished traditional hierarchies between original and copy, between large and small format.
Dodiya’s temporal architecture is finally manifested in his serial conception of work. Like an architect who develops a program according to different site constraints, the artist develops his themes in modalities that reveal each time new aspects of the initial motif. This approach evokes the variations that Borromini developed on the theme of the ellipse, revealing through the systematic exhaustion of formal possibilities the unsuspected richness of a simple architectural element.
Mumbai, matrix of the world
Impossible to understand Dodiya without grasping his symbiotic relationship with Mumbai, this city that functions less as a backdrop than as an active collaborator in his work. Mumbai does not just produce images; it produces a particular way of seeing, a scopic regime that transforms visual cacophony into complex harmony. Dodiya grew up in this metropolis that daily digests its contradictions, where a slum can border a skyscraper without anyone being bothered.
This urban geography is evident in his way of composing. His canvases proceed by accumulation and juxtaposition, reproducing the very logic of the Indian city where nothing is planned but everything ends up finding its place. When he paints his sister as a child on a commercial shutter, he is only reproducing on the scale of art this coexistence of the private and the public that characterizes Mumbaikar life.
The artist’s training at the Sir J.J. School of Art also anchors his work in a specifically Indian pictorial tradition. This institution, created by the British but quickly appropriated by local artists, perfectly embodies this capacity for creative diversion that characterizes contemporary Indian art. Dodiya inherits this tradition of creative adaptation, transforming European influences into a personal language.
His use of popular cinema reveals another facet of his urban rootedness. Bollywood is not for him a reservoir of kitsch images but a laboratory of the Indian collective imagination. His references to Satyajit Ray or to the romantic comedies of the 1960s testify to a cinephile culture that far surpasses mere personal taste to constitute a true method of social analysis.
History as plastic material
Dodiya’s relationship with history reveals a non-linear conception of time that challenges our Western thinking habits. For him, Picasso can be contemporary with Tagore, and Mughal miniatures can dialogue with Bollywood posters without chronological hierarchy. This approach evokes the Indian conception of cyclical time, where past and present interpenetrate without discontinuity.
His series dedicated to Gandhi perfectly illustrates this alternative temporality. Created in reaction to the 2002 Gujarat riots, it does not offer a nostalgic evocation of the Mahatma but an urgent updating of his message. Dodiya understands that Gandhi does not belong to the past but constitutes an active resource for thinking about the present. His portraits of the independence leader function like icons in the Byzantine sense of the term: windows open to a spiritual reality always accessible.
The use of quotation in Dodiya is less about erudition than existential necessity. When he reproduces a detail of Piero della Francesca or takes up a composition by Picabia, it is not a question of respectful homage but of active appropriation. These borrowings function like grafts that modify the very fabric of the receiving work, creating unexpected hybridizations that reveal hidden potentialities of the source works.
Creative borrowing technique
One of Dodiya’s strengths lies in his ability to transform quotation into original creation. His “Girlfriends” do not copy the old masters but reinterpret them according to a contemporary sensibility that reveals their hidden potentialities. This method evokes that of jazz musicians who transform a standard by reinventing it, keeping the harmonic structure while completely modifying the expression.
The artist’s technical mastery, his ability to faithfully reproduce the most diverse styles, could be mistaken for mere virtuosity. But this skill serves a more ambitious project: to demonstrate that form is never neutral, that it always carries ideological content that can be diverted, subverted, reoriented. When Dodiya paints in the hyperrealist style of cinema portraits, he reveals the mechanisms of seduction of the entertainment industry.
The question of the public
Unlike many contemporary artists who address primarily the initiated, Dodiya maintains a constant dialogue with his original audience: his neighbors in Ghatkopar, his family, his childhood friends. This loyalty is not sentimental but strategic. It allows him to test the legibility of his works with a non-specialized public, ensuring that his messages are not lost in the meanders of conceptual art.
This attention to the popular audience may explain his resistance to the sirens of international art. Although exhibited in the world’s greatest museums, Dodiya retains an artisanal practice that evokes that of bazaar sign painters. This loyalty to traditional craftsmanship in a world dominated by new technologies is less about nostalgia than political resistance.
Dodiya’s art ultimately reveals a simple but disturbing truth: authentic avant-garde is not born out of a break with the past but out of its creative reinvention. By refusing to choose between tradition and modernity, between local and global, between popular and scholarly, he proposes a third way that could well define the art of the 21st century. In a world fractured by exclusive identities, Dodiya reminds us that authentic creation is always born of generous mixing.
His works function like laboratories where new forms of cultural synthesis are experimented. They teach us that it is not necessary to give up our singularity to dialogue with the universal, that it is possible to be deeply rooted and authentically cosmopolitan. In this, Atul Dodiya perfectly embodies the possibilities and the contradictions of our globalized era.
- Sigmund Freud, Essais de psychanalyse appliquée, Paris, Gallimard, 1971.
- André Corboz, “Le territoire comme palimpseste”, Diogène, n°121, 1983.
