Rajesh Salgaonkar’s new body of work is a series
that comes from his stay at his London studio. Living in London he missed Goa
as much every day, he would do a small watercolor, ink rendering which later
grew to bigger sheets the size he needed to portray his entire surroundings at
the same intimate level of detail. In one way or another, he was always drawing
his world, from the optical scatter of woman, birds and fishes. He came to
embrace a self-sufficient tautology which all artists understand in their own
way, but few with such clarity of purpose.
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| Recent work by Rajesh Salgaonkar |
The erasure, for the most part, of the elements
as the space they left behind was liquidly unfolded and deciphered, induced a
psychologically potent side effect. Their absence allows the viewer to enter
archetypal precincts, through ambiguous outlines in dreamy blank spaces where
scenarios of love, memory are enacted forever, just as he did with drawings of
his immediate surroundings, one piece of paper folding under, a new one gluing
on until the drawing came to rest. A
consummate painter, Salgaonkar’s painterly surfaces appear to breath color.
They inhale and exhale color-spaces, made by a remarkable range of thick or
thin, fat or lean, brushed or wiped marks on works of paper that needed the
resistance of a solid wall behind it. Surprisingly, Salgaonkar’s whole
enterprise is dependent on its beginning: specifically, the graphic translation
of his first possession of a moment, a moment both poignant to him as being a
potential painting, and a personal incident or experience.
It is in these drawings that the artist commits
to paper his obsession with content and color through a myriad of diverse
marks. His hand was observed to move rapidly over the surface of drawing paper,
the small stub of a soft pencil hidden by his large hands. It was as though his
pencil’s point was his eye taking in the significant data. These drawings
allow access to spaces where it would have been almost impossible to take and
it is when we think about our own space as viewer in his paintings that we are
rewarded with a surprise of location, the deep space is flattened, near forms
are volumetric, and the negative spaces operate as both flat and spatial
simultaneously. For Salgaonkar drawing is sensation, and taking possession of
the image. The next step is the translation of these notations into color, not
local color, but the color that comes from his interior logic. The sensation
and its perceptual basis change mysteriously into the concept or the idea of
color. The painting uses localized color as a springboard to a far more unique
and surprising equivalent. Reflected color often plays a significant role. It
is the color in these shadows, rather than the color in the light that depicts
Salgaonkar’s highly original color variants and ensembles.
One comes to realize that reality and fiction
flip everywhere in Salgaonkar’s work. As for the artist’s encyclopedic works of
his immediate surroundings, they trade on the traditional fictions of life in
the way that disjunctive local spaces and times are fused under a continuous
skin of illusion. Yet it is life drawings very much in the tradition of that
genre, for all their annotated eccentricities that increasingly come to occupy Salgaonkar’s
watercolor masterpieces featuring the, maximal challenges for the artists’
ever-sharpening ability to see and describe. Using careful layers of
translucent watercolor, he could now capture the waxy glistening of dolphins, parrots
and peacocks and as one grasps the combination of flatness, space, and light in
Salgaonkar’s watercolors, the subtleties of his sophisticated palette and tonal
gradations reveal a seductive luminosity. Through this examination one’s
mind empties out, leaving oneself in a contemplative state. Or perhaps
better put, one becomes fully engaged in the moment peering simply into the
painting’s surface while marveling at the unique and nuanced light held by each
work.
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Nippon Gallery
30/32, 2nd Floor, Deval Chambers,
Nanabhai Lane, Flora Fountain, Fort,
Mumbai – 400 001India.
Nanabhai Lane, Flora Fountain, Fort,
Mumbai – 400 001India.