Satish Wavare’s abstractions suggest the cellular structure
of tissues placed under the microscope. Our eyes are treated to protean and
mysterious patterns of growth; the sensation of rich, teeming life attracts our
senses. That these paintings have been laid over imperial maps of tidal islands
and coral-spiked oceans renders them all the more alluring. It may well be an
accident that the artist should have chosen these cartographic records as a
base for his pictures; but the viewer, attuned to searching for significance even
in the incidental detail, is arrested.
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| (Bombay 1990: Satish Wavare with Rajshree Apte, Nitin Dadrawala, Prakash Wagmare and Sanjay Sawant ) |
Abiding connections are made here; as a post-colonial
subject, Wavare re-occupies and re-possesses territory alienated from his world
by the emperor’s map-maker; and then, a s maker of signs, the artists places his
binding cultural instruments over the unbound world of nature. The gesture can
no longer be one of arrogant confidence; it must necessarily be a tentative,
probing one.
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| (2013 :Satish Wavare working in Drawing Box) |
And what context could be more suitable for an act of
creation than a representation of the oceans? For it was in the primordial
oceans that life began; the composition of the original water that surrounded
the globe is the composition of hemoglobin. In other words: the archaic ocean
of origin still pounds in our blood. Seized by such thoughts, we turn to
Wavare’s exercises in symmetry and asymmetry: the halved fruit, the tree
developing from a primal. Glutinous soup, the triangle cut by its own double
image.
These rotations and translations of form are
charged with some magical energy; as these motifs divide, come apart and mirror
themselves, they seem to signify the many centuries if genetic behavior from
which they emerge, and the unnamed futurities onto which they hope to extend.
The interconnectedness of the universe manifests itself through these morphic resonances; it would not be too far-fetched to see at work in these paintings, a sensitivity that has grasped the interconnectedness of the universe, which connects the humblest seed to the highest pyramid. It is, none the less, an inchoate sensibility. Wavare has his conceptual goal in sight, but it is still in the process of serving his apprenticeship to the painterly traditions of skill.
The interconnectedness of the universe manifests itself through these morphic resonances; it would not be too far-fetched to see at work in these paintings, a sensitivity that has grasped the interconnectedness of the universe, which connects the humblest seed to the highest pyramid. It is, none the less, an inchoate sensibility. Wavare has his conceptual goal in sight, but it is still in the process of serving his apprenticeship to the painterly traditions of skill.
Mumbai: Autum 1996.
Oct 22, 1996- Nov 02, 1996. - Ranjit Hoskote