User:Prakash H. Ghadge

--Prakash H. Ghadge (talk) 13:38, 26 July 2012 (UTC)SILENCE:

“ Everywhere we travel, on every occasion on which we feel a desire, a longing, a lassitude, a vexation, is it possible to ask, to wonder….”- Roland Barthes.

Here is another language which resists anything else as much as it can: our poetic language. Whenever Prakash Ghadge enters the realm of performance that is his art practice in pen and ink on canvas either through self-insertion or other performers, the ground of representation profoundly changes and the line between the subject and object of representation gets blurred. Any concern with authenticity of the representation of the past is replaced by entangled temporality and a new mode of representation in which self-fashioning and masquerade override fixities of identities. It becomes a fusion of the visual and literary, and on another level a visual engagement with life.  He exudes a certain confidence in his abstracts, black on white series, as some critics refer as black and white drawings. But the sharpest articulations take place when Ghadge plumbs into the depths of his black-which is massive and subliminal. An alumnus of J.J. School of Art, Mumbai, he experiments with parity of form and dialogue between markers in juxtaposition producing a subliminal text; conceptual transformation in these drawings done pen and brush/ink is decisive here, it opens the investigation a domain in which each fact reveals as a gaze sensitive to difference, simultaneity or succession, and frequency, observed, isolated, then, compared with a set of facts and symptoms and thus become a sign and paintings later. This could take its place in a whole series where convergence or divergences were in principle measurable- wondrous shifts between intellectual processes and explicitly physical activities reunite the life of the mind with its bodily ground. The melancholia is infinite here redolent of the writings of Orhan Pamuk layered with an evocativeness. These remain chanced encounters for us; the dignity that once existed within the interface is now scattered across the silence of these forms.

The work showcased here in this exhibition, the figures waiting, a hovering silence inured to their own vulnerability, appear suspended in zones of unspoken communication, whose nature we can only speculate upon. This is perhaps the stillness of the forms of his earliest work, now rendered to suggest a separation between his subjects in an active world. Above all, even if there is a promise of pleasure, the suggestion of pain is never far away. Here the existential meets the topical and the present moment are fleeting, the lights announce as they pass by seemed quite so fleeting and scripts them over with incised linear scrawls and sweep of the lines evoking painterly traditions. Speaking of apparition, relinquishment and of various postures in his work link to this universal energy and how this positive energy elevates us from a common physical state of being to the metaphoric modes of life. The intricate illusionist lines in the background of his work is an expression of those positive universal waves which we are surrounded with and how through this phenomena Ghadge can elevate himself to a transcend state of mind and create a silence. The whole process of his work represents a physical engagement with technical aspect and the psychological meditative aspect which always elevates and eventually gives a feeling of catharsis, purification of soul. These choices are concerned with the questioning aesthetic closure suggested by the now much finalities of natural and illusionistic space which have made up the edifice of modernism that has used the distinguished hermeneutic device in re-writing the relations of a visual text to past history has sought to re organize its significance and functioning as discourse for the present by claiming any ontological privilege claiming one’s stake in reaching the limits, playing with them and establishing spaces. . “….the shadow of process always falls on the work as it becomes a presence in the world….. the grid or schema is the processual prehistory of the painting- an origin of sorts-that is then repeated and transformed in the work itself, that is somewhat bringing the work’s conceptual past into its more graphic, performative present”(-Homi. J Bhabha).

. Ghadge’s work is generated by meditation on mind and matter, arising and passing away, constantly moving and changing phenomenon, impermanence which is the universal reality and truth. His technical skill is considerable and attention to detail meticulous. He resists the risky conceptual ambiguities. The work is structured around the interactivity of body parts and in their tight and sonorous arrangements, project disunities and interpersonal separations as symptomatic of today’s unstable times. In the attempt to understand the break- up of unities, the loss and the separation between individuals and between the contradictory directions of the self is also conveyed. What we see in his large paintings is a retracing of this memory not to exercise it but to research it for artistic processes and self scrutinies. The figures are isolated despite the subtlety of their combinations. The important fact is that they do not consign the figure to immobility but it is a long line of flight that Ghadge creates because we are tracing the real and composing a plane of consistency, not simply imaging or dreaming- a realist balance that has long ceased to be a picture-fable. The body here refuses to disavow their own separation in a narrative splurge. He practices neither the dissimulation nor the emphatic disclosure of its various mechanisms. It creates its own untimely rhythm in order not to eschew the real to pitch their sanity in a new political sign keeping the viewer on the edge. The danger is, of course, that such images will become elemental and sink into particularity: they will end up as just another art school image of a model, Ghadge evades such artifices entirely. In his work, the element which was once provided by iconography now springs largely out of his expressive handling dissipating it neither to the terms- a reflection of the human body with infinite more rigour and tranquility rather than the excitement of an animated body. .

In these works, this imperturbable presence absorbs the agitations of the self or would say exude a certain degree of stasis. Outlines wobbled, ink spread; circles becoming ovals-He shifts to and forth simultaneously from large to relatively small formats, working with closer to the surface with a sense of intimacy in small and a sense of distance and space in large works that adds a sense of monumentality and markers used instinctively to stimulate the surface. It is necessary for him that his painting follows an internal spontaneous spirituality and becomes a self-generating organism. Apart from this startling esoteric beauty, there is something more than style, something other than the masterful technical expertise that gives his painting the foot –poundage of its striking power and penetration. Ghadge is in full accord; his act becomes an exaltation of pure form, the composite- compote, and the combinative and becomes euphoria. But more and more strongly, dredging up the subconscious visualizing the possibility of a tangible object, yet defies identification emerging from pure vision which is never sublimate; in fact an actual fascination of the adverse body.

One might say that poetry is a form of silence within speech- the one alive in our voice and it will involve a specific quest proposed by Prakash Ghadge in his works. Whether this desperate humanism, sustained only by the sheer energy of despair, does not fail to recognize at least one major resource which exists, almost visibly in his text, in the very fact of our language, this language which Ghadge himself used in trying to describe the self being torn apart in ecstasy save through pleasure. The fascinated painter entitled to consider with the excitement of an alchemist about to find the philosopher’s stone which is why he never fails to arouse the censure of pedants. There is a turning, a barely perceptible displacement that joins all the articulations and penetrates all the points submerge together by the imitated discourse. A trembling spreads out which then makes the entire shell crack. Schematically his imagery seen with a linear gaze acts as a map of elegant fantasies. What is terrifyingly ecstatic though disparate they are: is the spectre of non-saviour and profound exuberant visual reading which is anguish and disquietude, pleasurable inflection of the soul. The thin lines, not too long and calculated to record any single, sweeping movement of the artist’s arm, replace spontaneity with the conscious manipulation of its evidence. The small vessels seek to break out of “the purified domain of light and colour” that he establishes. Ghadge’s metaphorical vein is the path he undertakes- A bended figure in the moment of non-saviour, no repose or appropriation, no comfortable possession is posited, only affliction and supplication meeting at an imaginary point. It clarifies his visual text, not only the metaphor is only drawn out also orchestrated. The allegory in these works register a ‘communicator’ beyond dissociative metaphors and transposes the subliminal world of his central protagonist into a space, which by not answering our gaze directly rivets it, withholds from it, the matrix of departure pulsates with the texture he gifts them with fluent inscriptions allowing these pulsating dimensions to follow the natural folds, Ghadge uses them as multiple matrices of motion contradicting nature and this distinct use of lines create a formal contradiction on the finely grained canvas that gives life to the figures, a contradiction that is further heightened by a gesture, a look or an attitude is an inclusive act, unassuming as it is realistic, and it is bound to give a direction as it is realistic, and it is bound to give a direction as many of his works do, to a more sympathetic understanding . He introduces a measure of those “unresolved complexities of ongoing life.” In any event, he brought in a greater number of variables – and established a different take on getting back to basics. From which, once again it emerges our visual pleasure, the fatal induction of the artist’s language which ties the most tenuous inflection of our desire to the broadest reality, this unique space in which allegory and the social combinative are trapped. Instead, he is wry, dispassionate and somewhat accepting observer of conditions that have replaced our values and nature. Ghadge’s art practice aims to transcend boundaries imposed by geographies and cultural desire, a practice that dwells in a space free from all bondage to the visible, definite and the finite-most spare and ascetic, referring to his inner world he made in consummate bursts of energy in defined periods of time. The poetic and structural sign of another immersion in an essentially fluid domain will take us a step further in the exploration of Ghadge’s ingenious future meditations. We already know that a visual text that of Ghadge is like an abstract circle of truths, outside of which alone the solid residue of an individual logos begin to settle. We do not have much comfortable equivalences around us, an intimacy and decorum that stands as a unique example of the Master’s verve and language. The analytic mind itself, armed with triumphant reason, can only be doubly defined, by entering into details, by displacing the levels of perception, by revealing the hidden, by isolating the elements from their practical context, by giving objects an abstract essence, in short opening up the painted space of a visionary.

Nanak Ganguly, July, 2012. Kolkata.