Text & Photography BY Sneha Singhania.
Published:  16 NOV 2025.

From the late Jack Whitten’s six decades of restless experimentation to Visakh Menon’s practice today, Verve seeks to grasp abstraction — how it works, why it endures, and what compels artists to pursue it.

For the last two weeks, several visits to the posthumous retrospective of American artist Jack Whitten at The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) had consumed my days, the understanding I was seeking eluding me with each viewing. That unfinished conversation started decades ago in Whitten’s studio, moved through the MoMA galleries and seems to have been carried forward in Visakh Menon’s studio, where it is alive and restless. Earlier in the month, I had reached out to Menon, a multidisciplinary artist, creative director and educator whose work spans drawing, painting, media art and interactive design, while on my entirely accidental, Whitten-inspired quest to unpack abstraction.

I soon find myself inside Menon’s studio, a place of experimentation and study, a “laboratory”, as he calls it. I encounter paintings stacked high, drawers revealing new bodies of work, tables crowded with tools, 3D prints and overlapping lines and shapes everywhere. There are traces of earlier artistic endeavours too: Menon began almost exclusively in video and media installation after completing his MFA (Master of Fine Arts) in 2007 from the Maryland Institute College of Art, only later finding his way into painting. Paper scrolls containing mysterious ideas, colour studies and workstations for 3D printing and digital processes hint at a structured yet porous practice — a space to think, experiment, execute, reflect and also archive. Menon tells me, “Having the studio changed my practice in a lot of ways because now I had room to mess around.”