The established, Indian-born Melbourne-based artist and curator is widely known for his emboldened studies of colour and form. His fashion performance pieces extend this passionate language. Form from the Formless, made with gouache and pencil on paper and mounted on collapsible music stands, is a silent tribute to both idioms and is one of four bodies of work installed in Sequeira’s solo exhibition The Shape of Music.

The work’s colour applications are reminiscent of modernist Josef Albers’ endlessly pleasing tonal squares. It is a dialogue Sequeira has cultivated throughout his artistic life. He is happy to speak of passionate affinities with the work of Sonia Delauney and Sol LeWitt, among others. The artist’s candour is engaging and authentic, it is also a critical step in understanding what drives his intricately rendered aesthetics of time and measuring and the tonal purity he cultivates in the work’s overlaid circular entities.

Each sequence of perfect intersecting circles is accompanied by a portrait of a night sky above Bundanon, creating a subtle exchange. Form’s inky skies are unexpectedly random, yet as intricately painted as Sequeira’s earlier explorations of the art of Indian miniatures. It is an intriguing undertaking, provoking altered perceptions of the depth in night-time darkness, of time and of course, colour. Pinpricks of brightened solar activity lay a casual trail of tonal clues in this compelling series.

Sequeira makes no secret of his passion for colour. His 2018 Fugue installation of handblown glass vessels, created at Adelaide’s Jam Factory, is quite magical. He keeps adding to the initial one hundred glass vessels of different sizes, with vessels shaped as vases, dishes, and beakers, each with a colour density offering infinite possibilities. Now on view in The Shape of Music exhibition, these coloured glass objects sing in kinetic harmony with after-colours vibrating on a unique scale. Bold and joyful, Fugue’s translucent glass vessels are an unabashed celebration of beauty and form and of the artist’s patient creative passion.

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Elsewhere on view in the exhibition is Reach Out and Touch, Sequeira’s most recent lithographic series made with the Australian Print Workshop. Again, the artist’s fascination with the precision of interlocking, coloured circles lends an almost sculptural dimension to the forms. They’re perfectly graded, yet with shimmering afterimages reminiscent of Russian avant-gardists’ experimental geometry. The answer to the question of what happens when the yellow ochre of Share a Problem meets a half-moon lap of green remains intriguingly variable.

In each of these mediums, the artist’s lightly measured touch of colour and form can also be seen as a distillation of his Indian heritage. In this world of enforced migration and accidental diasporas, I’ve come to see geography and culture as the making of distinctive artistic mediums. David Sequeira’s The Shape of Music is an exquisite example of what might happen when an Indian modernist listens to the harmonies of colour, so as to create objects of awareness and delight.

David Sequeira
davidsequeira.com

Photography
Giulia Giannini McGauran