In each of the fifteen mixed-media on paper works of Aditya Pande’s solo exhibition “Half-Life” a circle lies contiguous to a semicircle. Composed digitally, these two elemental shapes are mathematically perfect, such that their radii are constant, even as the open semicircle symbolically implies an incomplete half. Literally, the shapes mimic the imperative word DO, while conjecturally, in their bright, playful colors, they appear anthropomorphized, as if they may be characters from an episode of South Park. But what are they satirizing? The abstract confusion of media within each of these works makes it impossible to create a complete story.

The ink-jet prints—some of which are black-and-white photographs of objects or images either miniaturized or hyperbolized to unrecognizable oblivion—are layered with a medley of randomly coded vector drawings, ink squiggles, dabs of enamel, tinsel, even baked clay. Acrylic glass forms a film over the prints, upon which painted shapes lend an illusion of movement and dimensionality.
While there is chaos, there is also calculation. Even as the blobs of paint disfigure, photographs consistently evoke not only the detailed anatomical but the large-scale geological. Suddenly, the semicircle is not an incomplete other, but a part of the whole. In Half-Life Form V, 2012, for example, the digital photograph might depict fingernails or slivers of moon. The crescents highlight equally the negative space in which they do not exist or can’t be seen. In a dance of concealment and revelations, the cosmic and the earthly become inextricably linked.

In a corner is a video of the artist, in fast-forward, desperately patting down a half-circle of clay in a circular window: It is here, possibly, that his command meets his art, where the rules of geometry must meet the error of the body, because the more that is done, the more is undone.

— Himali Singh Soin