“Black has always fascinated me,” said Jeram Patel, who passed away earlier this year at the age of eighty-six. “It seems that black in itself carries many things, no one knows deposited by whom, and when.” This preoccupation hovers in the air throughout “the dark loam: between memory and membrane,” a retrospective of Patel’s work curated by Roobina Karode; it snakes its way into the various rooms of the museum, settling as soot on wooden surfaces, or as dense, dark masses on paper, or blurry, bleeding, elongated forms in Chinese ink paintings.

Patel’s black does not evoke the oppressive darkness