On View at Pradarshak - “Remembering & Repeating” - semi-abstract figurative paintings by Aniket Khupse



12th Nov. – 24th Nov.’12: Pradarshak presents - “Remembering & Repeating” a solo exhibition of semi-abstract figurative paintings by Aniket Khupse

Aniket Khupse steers between past and present realities, conjuring pictures of people and situations, freezing a moment of the narrative on the question “Where does one go from here?”

In the mode of a pop artist, his tableaux emerges from an abstract flux of acrylic paint on paper, usually a liquid space in which figures float, dive in aquamarine hues or conduct conversations of the drowning.

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In trying to make sense of the environment, he portrays an existential dilemma of youth, using autobiographical data, harping upon indigenous social behavior – the seed bed of art for Khupse and a host of other contemporaries, who adopt the strategies of researchers, lost in the woods, as it were. In the case of Khupse, the search extends to ritualizing air and water, which are treated as sacramental substances in his largely elementarian art.

A faint lament, even self-mockery is discernible in Khupse‘s work where, trivial episodic moments are given significance and in an enunciatory mode that is a short, pithy statement. The condensation of meaning in figure-stance in action and in thumbnail-sketch patterns is a means to withhold direct and banal communication. A clear-cut or literal representation of an inner life of an individual is sought but not in easy equations of colour, form or expressivity. There is a controlled deadpan mildness in the watery aerosphere inhabited by the self and others – a taking of distance, an allusion to alternative stratagems of relating.

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He has intuitively adopted the position of the artist-in-exile, and that of the observer seeking, a provisional and mobile balance between the individual and his social environment.

Khupse has also placed himself as a character in the non-event like stories. This kind of self reflection offers a back and forth understanding of conditions in which the artist wants to intervene.

The pulls and pressures, sanctions and opportunities, are amplified in a homespun sociology that is build up with motifs like the hour-glass, the flower petal, the braid. They represent mental space, shelter, help-line or entrapment.

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Khupse’s works use these constant devices as he takes recourse to otherwise straightforward exposes of dream, waking life and desire. This artist suggests new ways of dealing with figurative references that crystallize into terse ditties that are more than expository and programmatic. The cameos breathe from the spaces of memory, remembering and repeating the phrases of pictorial devices.

As written by Roshan Jagatrai for Aniket Khupse.

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