Cosmic Love

About Artist

I Pravin Tejramji Dhanuskar born and brought up in “Katol” on 1st July 1984 a small village in Nagpur, Maharashtra . I am freelance artist, I lives and work in Mumbai. Curator Note- Manifestations of Dualism In his current series Pravin Dhanuskar examines the most intractable problem of all, organized human conditions and devises works that demonstrate the variety of forms in which our culture has conditioned us to literally see its solution. His paintings have a dual nature in that they are both rigorously formal and political. Neither the formal aspect nor the political aspects lose their force because of the existence and presence of their counterpart. Rather, each aspect is dependent on its counterpart because it is its counterpart. His work is not self-referential or physiological. He wants the work to be void of sentiment, intensely observed and matter of fact. There is in the work a collision of certain aspects of linear perspective and the constantly changing perspective of real space. He uses an extreme point of view and radical scale change of images to put pressure on the picture plane and engage and even disorient the viewer. Pravin finds his material in the graphic notations and images that inform us about world-wide socio-struggle: photos, of course, along with charts and maps and flags. The individual pieces large and small, and finished to a graphic perfection seem at first to make an arbitrary group. With closer study, though, we see that each work is built around one or another combination of these informational signals. To penetrate to the heart of the paradox embodied in Pravin’s works, it might be useful to begin by exploring the space evoked in them. Founded on Modernist theory, these works create a tension between our desire to read space into the paintings and our inability to do so. On the one hand, the use of some aspects of perspective and foreshortening is suggestive of illusionary space. On the other hand, the large, flat patterns of milk bottles, lips and circles, curiously stripped of cast shadow, allude to the integrity of the picture plane. Every inch of each work vibrates with a tense dialogue between space and flatness- illusion and reality. In addition to a rigorous analysis of the nature of space in painting, Pravin alludes to our experience of space in the real world. Here, in a second way, the works manifest a dual nature that is a corollary to the duality of experience. On the one hand, Pravin carefully uses certain aspects of linear perspective and foreshortening to suggest the solid, stable world of objects that we take so for granted. On the other hand, we recognize that it is no common, monocular, linear perspective at work here, but a fluid, dynamic, changing perspective that implicitly recognizes the fact that we are in constant motion, in an ever changing, moving world of space. Moment by moment, inside the works, the perspective seems stable, evoking the experience of a stable world of solid objects. But taking a work as whole, we notice that the perspective is fluid and shifting in a way that is reflective of our constantly changing perspective in real space. The net result is the creation of a tense dialogue between the two aspects of being. The style and the scale of the pieces vary considerably, too, but not in a random way. Each image is presented at an angle to the viewer through a carefully calibrated perspectival system that argues for potential actuality the way an architect's rendering argues for the real building. The effect is startling. The objects read as embodying both their ideal and their unique nature. So once again we are faced with another manifestation of tension, this time between the universal and the particular. In their formal play, Pravin's images ask to be analyzed despite their collective reference to pain and destruction. And his objectivity is further buttressed by the irony implicit in our understanding that what he depicts and that how he depicts them depends on internal rules and a strategy all his own. Further examination of Pravin’s paintings would reveal similar forces at work on each level. We discover deeper manifestations of dualism and the rigorously modulated tense dialogue implicit in that dualism. It is the rigor and depth of investigation of each quality that catapults this work out of the territory of mere perception and contrary dualities into the arena of metaphysics and politics. Abhijeet Gondkar Curator Mumbai, May 2015