2012

Yashwant celebrates the existence of objects that are part of his urban reality. He accentuates the lyrical and meditative elements of the object, and preserves the resonance in a monochromatic painterly treatment. This is an exercise in simplification of form. His objects become intimate autobiographical evocations that celebrate the poetry in our everyday reality. In most of his work the sculptural qualities are highlighted, and there is play with scale to make them larger than life. He celebrates the ordinary ubiquitous object and gives it iconic status. His objects grow beyond human scale and control. He limits his palette to a narrow range of tones which transform the objects into subtle poetic images; objects that symbolize the ordinary and are an extension of the body.

The artist has been exploring the phenomena of spatial perspective, and dialogues with colours with precision and assurance. He is able to create an eerie stillness and silence with these objects of utility and beauty. The heavily textured background has an abstract quality that creates spatial dimensions to locate his objects in focus. The pictorial devices are largely monochromatic browns and grey.

His quest for playing with space, texture and the angular linearity of the objects is meditative in quality. Design has become his term of expression and can lead to poetic perception in surface and depth.

As a restless artist, Yashwant has been constantly reinventing himself and pushing the boundaries of his conformity. In his last show, the artist created a sculpture which was a classical cone, in charcoal black. The scale and the tactile material explored the volume and the void created by the object.

In most of his early work the human presence was evoked by the object. The ergonomical design element of the object was central to his enquiry. He evoked the human presence by absence and invested in his objects to give an iconic presence, like a living entity.

In his new series the human body is at the centre. The borders of the image define prana--life breadth inside and loka—the world outside. Again these are iconic images, silhouettes of human beings in situations of action or repose. Yashwant looks at all forms as divine manifestations. They occupy the colour field as two-dimensional spacesand assert the human presence.

The artist recollects his rural upbringing, remembering his connection to agrarian society and his personal association to acts of labour that he witnessed during his childhood.

The cow and the local milkman are called “Kamadhenu” to respect labour and to explore the idea that work as worship. The tactile canvases are reminiscent of the clay and cow dung smeared on village walls. Another canvas depicts a Man carrying merchandise as a petty vendor; his body becomes an extension of his labour. The night watch man expands into a monumental figure and becomes a part of the architecture. Two sound speakers are bombarding the young girl on stage, probably reciting her first song in public. A happy young man sports a cool sling bag, his out-stretched hands are open as if embrace the entire world.  He celebrates iconographic divine images of Pandurang and Rukmini, they are seen as divine light. These images are monologues of individuals/actors who are enacting a poignant script of the artist in the theatre of life.

Yashwant’s solitary images occupy centre stage and are frozen in time. He portrayshumans in stoic silence. He looks at all humans as divine manifestations of the universalspirit, and invests in the essentials of the human body and gestures to create haikus from a lived reality.

Suresh Jayaram

(Tuesday, December 4 to Tuesday, December 25)

The basic models of human beings come from Nature, because we are a part of Nature. And if we look at the essence of what the natural world is about, we see that it's about change and process. So you find that in a human being, as he or she goes through life, there is a kind of a process we call in geological terms sedimentation, where the layers of human experience become like sedimentary layers in the earth. As these layers build up they move from the levels of the conscious and reason at the visible surface, to the deeper layers of the unconscious and intuition. Shinde does not distinguish between inner and outer Nature, between the environment as the physical world out there and the mental image of that environment within each and every individual. It is the tension, the transition, the exchange, and the resonance between these two modalities that energize and define our reality. The key agent in this exchange of energies is the image, and this space between is precisely the place in which Shinde's work operates.

Scattered among the animated brushstrokes are small, abstract forms in Shinde's basic colors that seem to be there at random, flying around on their own on the background of myriad strokes brushed against a deeper background of black or another solid color. In ancient Persian cosmology, black exist as a color and is considered to be higher than white in the universal color scheme. This idea is derived in part as well from the color of the pupil. The black disc of the pupil is the universe of the white circle of the sun. Believed to be a person's soul, existing in complementary relationship to the sun, the world eye Shinde's placement is artfully chosen. His hand has always been steady and authoritative. The images are composed are composed into a dense, richly interwoven stream- of-consciousness flow, comparable to the temporal complexity and sonic textures of the music, and organized like cascading, flowing water, with its areas of rapid motion, smooth flows, frenetic turbulence, disorganized chaos, undisturbed tranquillity, repetitive swirling eddies, cyclical whirlpools, and backwater respites of movement and reflection.

The paintings are executed and mounted in a diptych format. Shinde says, 'Our whole culture is based on a dualistic, exclusive, adversarial approach. Some say the intellect is superior human function, others say we are emotional beings. For me, however, the point is to try to connect these two essential elements so that they are put in balance, such that one doesn't dominate the other.' The viewers who come in to experience the work have to receive it with their whole body, not just with their intellect, or not just with their eyes, and that they will do so whether they are conscious about it or not.

Abhijeet Gondkar

(Monday, August 6 to Tuesday, August 21)

(Wednesday, April 18 to Sunday, May 6)

Within the ambiance of human existence lie a dichotomy; a kind of controversy- one that opposes each other, and primarily attached to the body and soul. These jointly perforate within a system that is both externally internalized, and internally externalized. These perceptions can be expressed by an artist as a visionary through figuration and a kind of body language. Both these complexities of negatives and positives, embedded within a framework of society and our emotional self. The ultimate recourse is to be found in abstraction, which extend, from such form contents to seek solace under a conscious us reality that is visible to the clairvoyant, but blind to the blind. Such a tendency can be amazingly noticed, in the recent oeuvre of Venkatesh Pate.

Today with the dizzying pace of technological and scientific advancements; we are in a century placed in an urban and suburban environmental setting, that is confused and muddled.

From a mere exploration of the human physical contour entailing sensibility as in yoga, Venkatesh has extended, transformed and transgressed through his art, to a real realm of beauty and pathos. Astoundingly simple and minimal in rendering, not excluding even the animate and inanimate life generating forms, placed in an isolated setting; make Interestingly certain works relate to semiotics, that informs us of the presence of the omnipotent. It is interesting to find how the negative and positive ultimately demand a harmonisation of the senses.

How does one find a solution to that? Today we find our dwelling spaces encroached by concrete jungles, of towering heights. Well, in the process of development we have ignored the very nature of our existence that should have been as, "God Created".

No more do we feel the warmth, of the early morning light, which trespassed by projected spaces, cut away the vital light to our lives. The birds too have no more trees to perch and to sing the morning psalm. The trees are no more there to park. Therefore 'No Parking', is in a sense a metaphor to, a lost freedom, to free space that restricts our movements; making living controversial; even to mitigate the negative, and to look forward to life with all its good essence in a positive way.

Despite complex in treatment, judicious employment of space division, and composition; the minimal carry this message effectively, and Venkatesh Pate sure succeeds in doing this with feeling and sensitivity engaging dark images in contrast, embedded in vast fields of plain whites, capable enough to retain a message of value in memory.

(Friday, January 13 to Wednesday, January 25)