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Ravikumar Kashi highlights the immediacy of the city experience by appropriating popular imagery
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STRIKING DIPTYCH In Results May Vary, Ravikumar Kashi shows two frames — one, a passionate girl with her head tilted and the other, a man whose head is literally on fire
Bangalore-based artist Ravikumar Kashi is known for his endeavour to capture sparkling and startling accounts of the urban milieu. His images relay the language of the city as seen through its distinct signs, symbols and messages; they seem to derive their visual stimuli from dramatic action on sleazy showbiz posters, and provocative narrative forms of commercial billboards. The 38-year-old artist identifies objects and events in the world around him, and collates them with an unaffected enthusiasm on his canvas. "As an artist I see myself as a witness to my times," he explains. "I am also a witness to the visual culture around me."
Technical assurance
At the same time, his paintings carry with them a series of mental lines, refinements and as importantly, a technical assurance, which can portray the restlessness and immediacy of city experience. Often split into diptych or triptych, the image highlights the duality of identity of an urban dweller, each part trying to convey a significant slice of an inescapable reality.
Kashi, who had his initial grounding under R.M. Hadapad at the Ken School of Art, went on to complete BFA in Painting from the Chitrakala Parishat in 1988, and MFA in Printmaking from M.S. University, Baroda, in 1990.
He held his first one-man show of glass paintings and prints in Pundole Art Gallery, Mumbai, in 1991. Since then, he has had more than a dozen solo shows of his paintings, collages, prints and paper pulp works in Bangalore, Mumbai, New Delhi, Chennai, Hyderabad and Glasgow.
He has also taken part in number of group shows and annual exhibitions in India and in Munich, New York, Singapore, Japan, Hong Kong, Berkeley, Perth, Mexico and Toronto. His works have been featured in prestigious events like the 10th Triennale of India in New Delhi; 11th Asian Art Biennale, Dhaka, Bangladesh; Arad Biennale, Romania; and Edge of Desire' travelling show of Indian art.
In addition to scholarships obtained during his college days, Kashi received the Bombay Art Society Award in 1990, Karnataka Lalit Kala Akademi award (1990 and 1999) and National Award in 2000. He won the Charles Wallace India Trust scholarship, which facilitated him to study papermaking in the Glasgow School of Art, U.K., in 2001.
In his exhibition, City Without End, Kashi presents about a dozen paintings with several handmade paper works cast in pulp. He considers the new set of works as a consolidation of earlier efforts, and confesses to having made some shifts, appropriating borrowed and popular imagery but subverting their meaning. "Apart from the interest in urban experience, the main theme of the work is also an enquiry into the process of generation of meaning in a work of art, and the interaction between images and text as well as different forms of communication like sign language, Morse Code or Braille."
The best works on display in the show includes Say Something , where the partially seen head and shoulders of a rubber body is raised on a metal platform and held in place by ropes tied to pegs; the silent tension built up by the seemingly dead or abandoned body and its precariously balanced position is further enhanced by the crisscrossing web of interconnecting destinations.
Narrating a tale
Someone is Waiting combines the effect of crumpled (love) letters, the silhouette of a waiting girl and a `magic' triangle to narrate an obvious tale. In Happily Ever After, a set of garishly coloured boxes in the lower half of the frame seem to displace an otherwise quiet and warm relationship of a couple whose silhouette is seen in the upper half.
Among other eye-catching works on show are Do It Yourself, where a couple of metallic headgears superimposed on a man's face seem to be in animated conversation; Results May Vary showing two frames — one, a passionate girl with her head tilted and the other, a man whose head is literally on fire; and Go Play, with an enormous robotic yet realistic human head suspended from thin air.
City Without End commences its four-city tour in Kashi's hometown, Bangalore. Thereafter, it will move to Chennai (January 2007), California (February-March) and London (April).
The Bangalore exhibition, which opens today at Gallery Sumukha, Wilson Garden, will be on view till December 30. Call 22292230.
GIRIDHAR KHASNIS
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