STUDIO 04 2025-26
DOCUMENTATION
Nostalgic Dreams (2025)
Nostalgic Dreams is a hand-painted installation built around the filmography of Imtiaz Ali, whose films, Rockstar (2011), Tamasha (2015), and Laila Majnu (2018), have been central to how I understand emotion, identity, and storytelling. Rather than simply recreating film posters, I wanted to make visible something that is usually invisible: the director's hand in shaping every character across his body of work. The investigation board format — thread and nails connecting individual character portraits back to a central portrait of Ali himself was a deliberate structural choice. The thread does not decorate the work; it argues something. Every character traces back to the same creative mind.
The visual language draws consciously on the tradition of hand-painted Indian cinema posters, which from the 1920s through to the 1980s were the primary means through which Bollywood communicated with audiences across India's vast linguistic and regional diversity. Artists like Baburao Painter and B.M. Gupta developed a bold, high-contrast, expressively coloured aesthetic that prioritised emotional legibility over photographic accuracy. This is the register I worked in, not as nostalgia for a lost art form, but because it is the most honest visual language for work about cinema as feeling.
Process
The work began with research into which films and which characters had left the strongest emotional impression on me. I made initial compositional sketches to map the investigation board layout before painting anything, testing how the thread connections would read spatially. The posters for Rockstar and Tamasha were produced first in oil paint, working at an A1 scale to give the installation its visual anchor. Smaller character portraits were then produced in acrylic, using flat single-colour backgrounds to create graphic contrast between figures. The central portrait of Imtiaz Ali was painted last, as a deliberate decision, as I wanted the characters to exist first and the director to emerge from them rather than the other way around.
One key decision I made during production was to vary the level of detail across the portraits. Some are fully rendered, others are more graphic and simplified. This was not an inconsistency; it was a conscious choice to reflect how memory works. The films and characters that affected me most are rendered with more detail; others exist more as impressions. This became an important realisation that carried forward into the next body of work.
In Character (2025-26)
In Character developed directly out of a realisation I had while making Nostalgic Dreams: what interested me most was not films as complete objects but individual characters within them, specific performances, expressions, and moments that had stayed with me across years of watching. This body of work shifts focus entirely onto the actor in the role. The title is precise: these are not portraits of celebrities, and they are not promotional images. They are portraits of characters with specific emotional and physical presence that a performer brings to a role, which makes that role unforgettable.
The nine portraits are arranged as a systematic grid, which creates a deliberate tension with the subject matter. The grid format is formal and objective; the characters depicted are anything but. That friction between the orderly display system and the emotionally charged figures within it was a considered curatorial choice. It also positions the work in conversation with traditions of serial portraiture, where repetition across a grid creates meaning that no single portrait could carry alone.
Close Up
Working in watercolour and acrylic, I found that the combination gave me bold, saturated background colours while allowing more fluidity in the figure itself. The flat, single-colour grounds were chosen to isolate each character from any narrative context. The viewer sees the performance, not the film. I selected characters based on the specificity and emotional intensity of their performances rather than on the fame of the actor. Each portrait went through at least two compositional decisions: which moment or pose to capture, and how much of the figure to include. Some are close crops, others include gesture and body language, because different performances communicate differently.
Making this series also clarified what the acrylic and watercolour media could and could not do. The works are graphic and immediate, but they do not allow for the kind of fine detail that certain performances demanded. This became the central question that drove the development of the next and final body of work.
Rockstar Animation:
This animation work reinterprets visual material from the song “Sadda Haq” in the film Rockstar, using drawn intervention to explore gesture, identity, and cinematic memory. By extracting and redrawing selected frames, I translate a moving image into a sequence of still, tactile marks before reassembling them back into motion.
The resulting video sits between painting and film—where the expressive language of portraiture disrupts and reshapes the original narrative, producing a fragmented, embodied viewing experience.
Animation Stills:
I’ve aligned the original stills with the edited painted stills on the side.
The process began by isolating still frames from “Sadda Haq”, focusing on moments of heightened expression and physicality. These frames were then manually redrawn, allowing for selective exaggeration, distortion, and emphasis through colour and line.
Each drawing functions as both an independent image and part of a larger temporal sequence. By reintroducing these altered frames into a digital timeline and adjusting the frame rate, the work reconstructs movement in a way that feels unstable and mediated, highlighting the tension between cinematic flow and the labour of mark-making.
This method transforms passive viewing into an active reconstruction, where the body, gesture, and emotion of the original footage are filtered through a slow, material process before returning to motion.
Sadda Haq Stills (Rockstar, 2025), 1800 x 1200px
Visual Sources:
Much of my work draws from Bollywood films and posters. The following images represent some of the visual source material used to develop and inform these pieces.
A collection of original film posters from Bollywood movies and reference images used to make portraits:
Final Exhibition (2026)
For the final exhibition, I focused on producing more intimate works through a shift in medium. Transitioning from acrylics to coloured pencil introduced a slower, more controlled process, enabling close attention to detail and surface. Beginning with a sketch, each piece was developed through layered applications of colour, allowing the image to emerge gradually and emphasising the tactile, time-intensive nature of mark-making.
This was the first portrait developed using coloured pencil. While the process was slow and demanding, the resulting clarity and detail produced a more refined representation of the character, prompting me to continue exploring the medium.
Statement
Vidisha Tripathy