… Interpretation of Dreams

Nilesh Shilkar’s artistic mission has been no less ambitious than an attempt to represent the structures of knowledge and belief that we use to understand and visualize it. Shilkar’s works are continually expanding and evolving and stems from his imagination, and is catalogued in a conceptual chart replete with allusions drawn from occult practices, traditions, and scientific elements and principles. The works delineate the universe’s formation as well as the attempts and limits of human consciousness to comprehend its vastness. His work deals explicitly with the idea of information being on the surface and information the subject of his work. Shilkar creates works on canvas, texturing it for three-dimensionality which ties the sprawling works together into a narrative structure. Offering a fresh perspective on the fusion of cultures, practices, and aesthetics, Shilkar’s key to understanding his work, draws attention to forms of culture on the fringes of the mainstream and reveals hidden personal histories within the context of what he himself has experienced. He was brought up in Shil near Ratnagiri, where he still lives. 

Shilkar's talent lies in examining his surroundings in an almost anthropological fashion. Many of his installations reflect how communities in Mumbai have appropriated elements of mainstream culture and mimicked, altered, and even parodied it to make it their own. For "Projekt Thibaw," an exhibition on view at the Thibaw Palace, Shilkar pasted a large world map and inserted with a large trowel at the centre. The piece is now part of Thebaw collection; but the earlier projects, such as Mumbai Shanghai, and Complimentary Dish, make clear the link between Shikar's incisive analyses of contemporary culture and conceptual political art more generally, often resulting in humorous and insightful observations on the hierarchies of art and life.

This impression is due to the stratification of compositional levels: layers of large and regular chromatic planes studded by small drawings and by digressions in calligraphic style are overlaid with miniature figurative openings and sinuous abstract drawings are added. The accumulation of overlapping layers, colors, and images uniformly covers the surface, becoming indifferent to the boundary with the pictorial stratification conferring depth to the paper, the various elements that make up the work appear to occupy a volumetric space, while the images and colors seems to be the result expressed in three-dimensions. The pictorial density, in which the figurative elements are interwoven and mingle, and sometimes are superimposed upon others, is thus revealed as an expression of the artist's cultural condition. 

The initial impression of a chaotic and uniform density is substituted by a curiosity that leads the viewer to the exploration of three-dimensionality as a visual translation of memory and time. A three-dimensionality in which the stratification corresponds to the intersecting or the melting in one's mind of memories more or less recent, to the battle between the urgency of the present and the evocative force of the past. Elbowing for space on paper are pictorial styles and visual data mediated by tradition, as one can make out in the tiny landscapes that invade at several points, iconography or personal memories seen with the eye of the artist's original culture. The compositional hierarchy: the figuration uniformly supports, and the material has evidently undergone a strong selection by the artist, allowing some elements to take precedence. For this reason, the works appear as a more evolved emotional form where memory, no longer obsessive, seems to be driven into a structure and a defined meaning

In his painting there is no insistence on reinventing time, nor is there an attempt to make the past present, for past and present are shown completely. Memories shift among nostalgic motivations; they are mirrors of ourselves that envelop us like whirlwinds. Nilesh Shilkar has the ability to show coherence and freshness in painting based on the symbolic elements of a historical reality. Freeing himself of the imposing and limiting sense of a mere transposition of images and symbols, he realizes a subversion of the imagination stemming from the inheritance manifested in the implicit power relations. Subversion often begins through references that extend inside or outside the space of the canvas. The artist gives a new dimension to painting as he approaches or distances himself from the two-dimensional plane the images decompose into a dissociating effect that transforms the pictorial matter into intoxicating condensations, into contractions, and into impulses. The artist offers us a rich game of semantic suggestions where the course of history is no longer delineated as before. The autonomy of the symbol engenders a reality gathered from the material itself. He thus procures to rescue memory, not as the actualization of the past, but rather as its prolongation into the present, for the present depends on the past in order to manifest itself. Nilesh Shilkar's work is a release transposed with rare mastery for the world of painting. Through a powerful and free transfiguration, he evokes testimonies of memories and of the present, made of matter and rebellion, dream and reality.

 

Abhijeet Gondkar

February 2025

Nilesh Shilkar

Solo show

Curated by Abhijeet Gondkar @abhijeet.gondkar

Preview: 25th February, 5.30 pm onwards

Exhibition continues till 1st March 2025.

Daily between 3 pm and 7pm

Gallery Nippon 30/32, 2nd Floor, Deval Chambers, Nana Bhai Lane, Flora Fountain, Fort, Mumbai - 400 001

Open on Public Holidays, Appointment only

#nileshshilkar #soloshow #contemporaryart #art #exhibition #artgallery #painting #artist #artcollector #soloexhibition #gallery #artexhibition #sculpture #installation #contemporarypainting

Sharmila makes paintings to be reckoned with. Her largely abstract canvases and wild seaside landscapes can be broody, even confrontational, in earthy dark tones.

 At first glance, the bold patterns in Sharmila Gupta’s recent paintings and drawings appear to mark a change in direction from the large gritty paintings of tidal pools that were her last body of work. On further viewing, it becomes apparent that her familiar landscapes have become compressed into signs or ideograms. These perhaps reflect time spent in walks in the woods during the lockdown when she made a study of aboriginal bark as well as the abstract lineage of modernism. Sharmila’s new paintings light up the exhibition space. She moves easily between representational and abstract imagery, and she mixes seemingly contradictory inclinations. For example, her process is messy and engaged, but her compositions are deliberate and playful; her work shifts suddenly from somber to slapstick; she has a sincere belief in painting’s transcendent power.

Artist: Sharmila Gupta

The intimate, explorative body of work exposes her complex interaction with a particular place and it’s shifting transient nature. Sharmila has often spoken about rejecting the picturesque in favor of primordial nature as represented. She has found these necessary elemental motifs. At the edge of water and land, she has become immersed in the visceral experience of light, space and motion. There she has sought to bridge the atmospheric, volumetric world of matter and its equivalence in signs. Landscape thus becomes an arena not only to view the fleeting nature of the elements with its seasonal and biological cycles but also a vessel for thought and process within the context of various pictorial languages.

Sharmila makes paintings to be reckoned with. Her largely abstract canvases and wild seaside landscapes can be broody, even confrontational, in earthy dark tones. But many of these paintings sparkle with brilliant blues, and cheery greens, reds, and yellows. Darker colors crop up and provide terrific contrast. Sharmila completed her part-time course in painting from Sir J J School of Art and since then she has continually challenged herself, grappling with form in oils water-colours and collages; with space and surface in abstract painting and art history. One thing has remained constant her delight in the elemental quality of paint. She’s like a kid with finger paints, or making mud pies. She fills her canvases with smears, dollops, and grit. Her passion can’t be missed.

In her current suite of works some of her former complex spatial panoramas with their diverse vantage points and horizon lines remain. Sharmila, however, has often changed her viewing perspective. At times, she has vicariously crawled along the surface of the earth or seen things as a fish traversing water or as a bird from above or a combination of different vantage points in the same painting, a vertical panoramic space is grounded by two trees uniting land, fire, water and sky seen both from above and at the horizon. By contrast, Sharmila Gupta reveals a flatter, condensed spatial world of water patterns containing floating interactive shapes. Viewed from above, a brown form hovers over incoming and outgoing tides acting as a magnifying glass revealing particles of pollution. This pivotal form compresses the action of nature and shield shapes reminiscent of the mapping of water trails found in aboriginal painting.

Sign language becomes even more evident in small watercolor drawings that evoke musical exercises with their motifs and recapitulations of the ebb and flow of tides: times of day amidst floating objects pulled by currents. Sharmila has stated that all her abbreviations of shapes and forms come from acute observation of particular sites. Her drawings reflect these observations of a sea world with undulating patterns, horizontal and vertical lines that act as cross currents creating pulsating tensions. Sharmila subverts our expectations of space. Despite the horizon line, we appear to have a bird’s-eye view. The piece’s crackling rhythm, intoxicating tones, and the artist’s loose, playful hand make the works a joyful exclamation. These dense, expansive little nature-scapes gleam like gemstones.

Sharmila’s quest to reassemble pictorial language from a diverse painting vocabulary is no easy task. Throughout her long career she has searched for ways to meld the painterly traditions of Abstract Expressionism. Over the past decades she has been moving back and forth between both pictorial concepts, sometimes emphasizing her love of light and expressive painterly forms, other times using abbreviated signs, and sometimes managing to simultaneously employ both modes. In her painting series, she combined ideograms, patterns that interact with volumetric shapes and atmospheric moods. The exhibition shows a good introduction to her innovative merging of the physical tactile world with a formal language of signs, ideograms and pictographs, expanding the painter’s language in this time.  

Abhijeet Gondkar

January 2022, Mumbai

Artist's Statements...

Myself, Sharmila Gupta, an abstract painter. My artwork includes oil on canvas, acrylic on canvas and paper. 

Passionate about painting I create whatever I perceive after observing the environment around me. I interprete the cosmos of colour and form through my visualisation to express them uniquely.

Perseverance and expedition has shifted the quality of my works and opened a new realm off possibilities and offered me with a different context of painting and my relationship to it's process.

Sharmila Gupta.

Artist

From: 31st January to 6th February 2022

"Forms of Musing"

An Exhibition of Paintings

By artist Sharmila Gupta

VENUE:Jehangir Art Gallery

161-B, M.G. Road Kala Ghoda, Mumbai – 400 001Timing: 11am to 7pm

Re-visiting Mehlli

“I believe that in painting, everything should come out of a complete need. Color should only be used when totally necessary.”

Mehlli Gobhai
Image Courtesy: Chemould Prescott Road

Mehlli Gobhai, born in Mumbai in 1931, completed his undergraduate education at St. Xavier's College. He then trained as an artist at the Royal College of Art in London, and the Art Students League and the Pratt Graphic Center in New York. For twenty years after his studies, he lived and worked out of New York. His first major show titled Marking Black was exhibited at the Bronx Museum, where he showed 5 canvases alongside artists like Richard Serra, Sean Scully and Larry Bell. Gobhai returned to Mumbai in the late 1980s.

Untitled-14,mixed media on paper, 51.5 x 66 inches, 2010
Image Courtesy: Chemould Prescott Road

In his studio, in Mumbai, are found objects from his farm in Gholvad, dried coconuts to dolphin skull. “In my work, like nature, there is a compulsion towards the ‘axis mundi’. It is like the spinal cord – something derived from nature. The human body is an architectural feat. Through my anatomy study and my work, it has brought me the closest I have come to a sense of truth and a grand design.” says Gobhai whilst describing his work, using the term ‘organic geometry’, for its shimmering vibrancy. “The sense of aging and transformation of an organic form, and morphing it into something new appeals to me.” Even across a room, Gobhai’s geometric abstractions seem to emit a sub-audible hum. Their energy is so high that their physical boundaries appear permeable; they easily charge a space substantially larger than the four constructed canvases that they are painted on and the fourteen works on paper that completely fill the large rooms of Chemould Prescott Road.

As with most abstract painting, it may be fairly easy to describe what the paintings look like – repetitive geometric patterns rendered in an essentially earth-toned palette – yet nearly impossible to describe the aesthetic of their visceral impact. What exactly does a radiating starburst or proto hound-tooth pattern mean anyway? No matter the intricacy, how does one discuss a painting of a shape?

Untitled-2 mixed media on constructed canvas, 60 x 60 inches, 2010

Image Courtesy: Chemould Prescott Road

In looking for a conceptual foothold, where no overt narrative presents itself, how natural, how tempting to contemplate the physical origin of the artworks. Indeed, close inspection of Gobhai’s paintings makes for an intriguing exploration. Gobhai’s abstractions are not intentionally obfuscated nor are they apparent descriptive imperative. Absent, more overt rational as these, there might be a reasonable and strong inclination on the viewer’s part to assume that Gobhai’s painting exits solely as an outlet for his need to apply paint in the most painstaking way possible. It is at this point; one might begin to wonder if the artist is engaged in obsessive-compulsive behavior that, only incidentally, results in an artwork. No doubt that for the layman, Gobhai’s process must seem physically redundant and numbingly time consuming; for most people it is close to impossible to imagine sitting down and laying application, removal and addition of layers of acrylic, charcoal, graphite, zinc, aluminum powder and pastel one after the other, that add up to make a single painting.  

Although, it might be tempting to deconstruct Gobhai’s process and even, on a certain level, gain insights into the work by doing so, it is imperative not to lose sight of the seductiveness of the object itself. If we become obsessed with the process over the impact, then it is easy to be overwhelmed by the marks without keeping a fix as Gobhai does on their functionality. With attention to the intricacies of material, construction and placement, Mehlli Gobhai’s constructed canvases form an intriguing symbolic system. Gobhai mixes monochromatic and minimal styles with expressive use of color and form. His work is permeated by a powerful sense of the uncanny; he infuses textures and images with a dramatic, atmospheric charge.

Evoking a magical and emotive experience of time, place, and action, Gobhai both romances and unsettles the viewer with a sense of both revelation and mystery. He arranges elements in ways that privilege texture and tactility. With a theatrical flair reminiscent of Duchamp, he explores the social and personal implications of mixing abstraction and figuration.

Abhijeet Gondkar

(Abhijeet Gondkar is an independent writer and curator based in Mumbai. The above excerpts are from review of Mehlli Gobhai’s solo show at Chemould Prescott Road in 2011)

"DON'T ASK ME ABOUT COLOUR" - Mehlli Gobhai, A Retrospective

   Curated by Nancy Adajania & Ranjit Hoskote

 6 March – 25 April, 2020

National Gallery of Modern Art, Mumbai

The Accidental Jacket

“The Accidental Jacket” includes a new series of paintings that anticipates Pratik Ghaisas’s playful studies of personal identity; he delivers a deeply felt experience of human absence in a new installation of exquisite subtlety. Each work is meticulously crafted to its own emotional note. Beautiful and rich in associative resonance, the piece eviscerates abstraction and lodges right in the bones. Between the moments of tenderness and the undertow of anguish, the form pulsates with the full spectrum of human emotion. Circling its exterior, its outermost arm forming a closed ring, we’re barred from entering; we become empathic onlookers of the whole human drama.

 Artist : Pratik Ghaisas

Artists of the previous generation, the Pop painters and Minimalists, who came of age in the 1960s, defined the unity of their concerns by creating distinctive visual styles a Warhol, like a Lichtenstein or a Donald Judd, is unmistakably their personal product. What links these visually varied early works together is what might best be called a consciously eccentric poetic sensibility, his irony-laced fascination with unexpected sensory pleasures. One basic, longstanding rule governing the visual arts is that pictures and words tell stories in essentially different ways, and so should not be mixed together. That the human mind can conceive of a nothing as a something is an extraordinary feat of intellectual abstraction.

Gazing down across the form suggestive of our galactic home, we’re led to consider our predicament in the universe. Bound inside time, acutely aware of our own smallness and finitude and yet feeling ourselves and those we love to be as large as the world, we live in eternal incongruity with our indifferent cosmos. The economy of means with which Ghaisas is able to evoke such ultimate questions is remarkable. Indeed, his use of a metonymically implied personal space to conjure the universal charges, the work with the kind of condensed expression we expect of great poetry. The human mind may be able to grasp negation between the abstract and the reasoning faculty founders when it comes to its own. Perhaps it’s only with the language of poetry that we can think the unthinkable and, if not exactly accept the unacceptable, dare to feel the flame in all its intensity.

Though there all along, the issue of using a shaped support came into particular focus during the 1960s as an emphasis on both the painting as object, its unnecessary privileging of easel painting and ultimately the expendability of using only a single rectangle. In the current series the artist brings together and explores the possibilities of a shaped support as an optional formal development. But gone today are the conscious strictures and aesthetic divisions articulated in 1967 by Michael Fried in his germinal essay ‘Art and Object Hood’. There are works here that evince playfulness or Dada disregard for convention, as well as a compositional exuberance of both materials and pictorial forms that ultimately set an overall shape. That is to say they find shape by an excessive build up of material itself, or in working with one form or another, leaving those shapes to define an external perimeter edge.

The artist narrates how his father and his contemporaries were responsible for building audacious and imaginative meccas of free play, in particular that exceeded even the best paradigms. Examining the pictorial thinking of outsiders often takes a back seat to the thrill of rescuing overlooked objects from history. An excitement that is fueled by a perhaps unconscious nostalgia for artistic sincerity is elicited by work that often bears a coincidental visual relationship to modernism but is untainted by modernism’s worldly ambition. This is not really the case with Pratik Ghaisas. The correspondence to mainstream art in his work is not superficial. The diligence and concentration that he brought to his work are qualities of many mainstream artists, and tells us a lot about what it means to be an artist. As an artist, he exists on a twentieth century continuum. Art has historically been forged in solitude, and though it is tempting to romanticize it, his solitude, while deeper than that of most artists, fueled a quiet passion that is evident in the mood and intensity of the work and beyond its psychological concerns, these jackets tell a dynamic story that change with each subsequent viewing.

Abhijeet Gondkar

March 2020, Mumbai

Visible Invisible

solo exhibition
by Pratik Ghaisas


2nd March To 8th March
11AM To 7 PM

Jehangir Art Gallery


Inauguration on 2nd March at 5pm.