Untitled

Before he began to use encaustic in his work, Shanti Dave had already begun to paint in the abstract using oil impasto, ‘building’ up his paintings layer by layer for a tactile impact. With the encaustic technique, his experiments reached a higher plane. His canvases, such as this Untitled one, became landscapes with many layers, the uppermost concealing, as it were, lost civilisations—an impression he carried from childhood when he saw archaeologists working at a Harappan site near his village in Gujarat. ‘The ruins spoke to me,’ he recalled.