2005

The Second Coming is more like a summing up of various styles of photo-like art making that is abound in the scenario. My humble request to the viewer is to formulate his/her own judgments about artists' works and be not dogged by whisper campaigns that could lead you to a select few. To this effect, I have painstakingly sorted some very fresh faces to be shown along with artists who have already been around. The selection of artists in this show is completely democratic and not a single one has come through any kind of recommendation. Further, I would also like to add that today- it is moreover a question of what all different kinds of photographic art is being produced rather than which artist is at the top of the food chain. I'm consciously therefore, calling for a more democratic purview.

(Monday, December 12 to Monday, December 26)

The quality of the earth determines the quality of the landscape, contributing to construct the respective landscapes. In addition, the earth provides the basis for the production of colours for his work, with which he develops his image. In mysticism, too, the earth is assigned a particular significance: earth is primary material, conveyor of energy; earth becomes beginning and end. Apte moves through landscapes and in the process experiences him as part of the landscape. He moves across the earth and is borne up by it. He attempts to experience the nature with all the senses, to comprehend it through observation and to feel it physically. He applies the earth with his hands, and the painterly gesture develops from a movement that comes from the body - a movement that derives from the memory of his movement through the nature, from the aura of the landscape as he experienced it. He wants to bring this aura to light through earth itself, not wanting to create a reproduction but rather a kind of microcosmic intensification of it. The sand of the desert, for example, has different qualities and energies than the stone of a volcanic island or cities. At this meditative level he seeks to comprehend the essence and power of mother-nature.

Apte's works are proto-typical or ideal form of architecture, with no aesthetic justification as a separate art. The mind or consciousness of man's progresses, however slowly, by the conquest reality, by which we mean the invention of new images that represent the nature of reality, as present in the consciousness of the artist. In that sense, science and art are parallel activities, the one advancing from empirical observations to new and ever more comprehensive concepts, hypotheses about the nature of the physical world, the other advancing from intuitive apprehensions of the nature of the same physical world to new and ever more exact images representing such intuitive apprehensions. The images of the artist are concrete - that is to say, material constructions project the mental image as icons of universal significance.

(Monday, October 17 to Saturday, November 5)

(Tuesday, September 20 to Wednesday, October 12)

(Friday, July 29 to Saturday, August 13)

(Wednesday, February 9 to Monday, February 28)