Parveen

Desire, beauty, and consumption. With a gaze reminiscent of the golden age of Indian cinema, the woman in the painting is the transcedental Indian actor Parveen Babi. A revered icon, she was both a participant in the spectacle of glamour, yet ultimately and tragically consumed by it. She looms large, her intense presence amidst the glossy surfaces of a SS99 ice blue metallic Miu Miu slipper, a vintage red patent purse, and a delicious juicy gummy bear. These luxurious, dopamine inducing symbols of consumerism fragment her identity, harvesting her aura into an advertisement, where beauty is both currency and performance, devoured by culture and endlessly repackaged for commerce.

Is this dream or reality, seduction or alienation, glamorous or grotesque? The surface allure of the beautiful objects is intoxicating and unsettling, as if something uncanny lurks beneath the gloss. The claustrophobic composition evokes the aesthetic excess of capitalist desire. The oversized Miu Miu slipper, almost absurd in its prominence, possesses a surreal agency, blurring the line between commodity and character. This surreal scale of the objects creates a sense of disorientation, as if the dream is tipping into a delirium, much like our contemporary times.

Parveen’s perfect cinematic face and larger than life real life persona, becomes a reflection of an era, a culture, forever preserved in time. Beauty here is worshipped yet alienated, eternal yet ephemeral. Her gaze is hypnotic yet haunted and oscillates between engagement and detachment, as though she is both aware of and trapped within the illusion. In this way, the painting dissolves the boundaries between desire and destruction, selfhood and spectacle. It is a space where these contradictions are not resolved but heightened—her beauty and spirit are devoured yet remains eternal, where consumption is an act of worship yet one that ultimately devours the worshipped.

In a way that echoes Marcel Proust’s meditations on memory, longing and desire, this painting captures the ephemeral nature of desire—how it is constructed, pursued, and ultimately, how it dissolves. Like Proust’s madeleine, the objects in the painting are saturated with meaning, not just as commodities but as vessels of nostalgia and dreams. Waldia’s work does not simply critique capitalism; it seduces before revealing the void at the core of the spectacle, asking what remains once the illusion fades.