today | stay

today | stay brings to light a vision of passages amid distant voyages set against the backdrop of Hong Kong in a new exhibition of paintings and works on paper by Nikil Inaya. Surveying the prelusive decade of his oeuvre the artist elicits a familiarity with the metropolis to credit its enduring internationality as well as its caveat as liminal destination town. Dedicated to his late grandmother Shanta Bala is a collection of still lifes that inform an interpenetrative figureground relationship within the dialectic of nature morte painting. These vanitas pilgrimages reflect an ephemeris of love, loss and legacy, lending themselves to prelapsarian themes and eschatological discourse alike. Sustaining this direction is a succession of portraits alluding to folklore traditions and the ritual of naturalists to confront classical subject matters as analogous as Puranic iconography and Shakespearean drama. The performative act itself of painting so becomes the praxis around which revolves a series of monolithic oil canvases. These tactile surfaces not only nod to the influence of the artist’s late friend Canadian-born Chinese painter Matthew Wong but also draw from the cinema of the Hong Kong New Wave with titles as illuminating as they are elusive to suggest episodic landscapes in a citadel of terminals. Within the ambit of filmmaking then the artist’s own short Different Every Night interrogates that which frees the actor in as much from formal limitations of language and the conventions of habit as from the very boundaries of identity.