Xippas Gallery has the pleasure of announcing the first Karishma D’Souza solo show in Paris. Born in Mumbai in 1983, D’Souza is a young painter who belongs to the new generation of Indian artists. Having graduated from the University of Baroda, D’Souza has shown her work in Europe following a residency in Rijksakademie in Amsterdam. In the work of Karishma D’Souza, memories of places, stories and people are containers of a psychological world. Drawn from the anchor of lived experiences, the paintings are places of acknowledgement of the dignity of journeys, of stitched together personal realities.

A Reckoning: “It’s just as well my pitcher shattered”1
The past has fallen away like a bridge in an adventure game; I didn’t see it coming. The path still exists ahead of me, it needs to be run, for a while.
My paintings draw from Mughul and Pahari miniatures, the geometry and the delight in life, peacefulness, in a memory of a Rajasthani miniature painter working with a fine brush, complete concentration, within a community, where the work is without individual authorship. I look for absolute quietness in a painting, where the human figure acts as witness. It existed, it occurred, because we remember. Acts and their consequences remain and demonization gets everyone crazily lost.
Then there is love, which reaches into the farthest spaces, which is never left behind, people poetry. The paintings are odes to being held, letters to loved ones.
“..In the house of the soap maker, those who don’t fall learn how to dance”
Milonga of Don Nicanor Paredes, Jorge L. Borges

Or step outside, and don’t return till the water runs out.
The paintings hold memories, documentations of places visited, lived in, known well and internalized, through poems read, which reach out across time and inform present circumstances and realities, continuing to provide a pause and acknowledgement. They are collections of stories, based in observation, the wisdom and insights of people, that are daily occurrences. Through them one hopes to solidify something known into a resting place glimpsed or felt, a step, which will shift the narrative’s boundaries so that it continuously widens, holds all, is all- encompassing, all-inclusive.
Paraphrasing from Spinoza – The more perfect something is the more reality it has.

1.“It’s just as well my pitcher shattered, I’m done with all that hauling water” Kabir, 15th century poet, the Kabir Project publication, 2008