Over the past three years, since its inception, Ruchika’s Art Gallery’s annual exhibition that marks the gallery’s anniversary has evolved to script the fortitude and vigor of Goa’s visual art. In the past as an inclusive exhibition, Carnival of Colours located itself as a pan-vision of local contemporary art. Representation was fundamental and critical. However with recurring interests in art from this region from collectors and curators alike, it has become essential to pay attention to (some) detail and not to the collaged whole.

Today art from Goa has undoubtedly acquired a premeditated and conscious imaginative freedom. Carnival of Colours 2011 reflects and records that the anxious search and establishment of an identity has now changed. For long in the missionary position , wedged between the recessive well-flogged and tedious rhetoric for a vision that is local in character to satisfy established norms and a nudge to claim its own identity within a larger framework, the Goan visual sensibility now embraces a more democratic and celebratory perspective. Several pre-conceived notions are being swept off the shores of Goa’s visual art practice. Art from this beautiful state is no longer caught in the web of predicaments that trap the local and cultural.

Thematically and technically subtle changes that earlier occasionally reared their heads are now the order of the day. Undoubtedly many more horizons have emerged for the Goan artists, thus elevating its setting. One of the most prominent features in the work of the artists showing here is that they do not attempt a representation of the immediate reality as such nor incorporate mere aesthetic figurations but hold substance that portrays  Goa's rich well blended confluence of cultures.  While actualizing their concerns they reveal various kinds of energies. It reflects the diversity and complexity of contemporary culture addressing issues of identity and those of all fringe cultures. On the whole Carnival of Colours 2011 reveals the unique concerns and formal interests of artists working in Goa.