12th Nov. – 24th Nov.’12: Pradarshak presents - “Remembering & Repeating” a solo exhibition of semi-abstract figurative paintings by Aniket Khupse
Aniket Khupse steers between past and present
realities, conjuring pictures of people and situations, freezing a moment of
the narrative on the question “Where does one go from here?”
In the mode of a pop artist, his tableaux emerges
from an abstract flux of acrylic paint on paper, usually a liquid space in
which figures float, dive in aquamarine hues or conduct conversations of the
drowning.
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In trying to make sense of the environment, he
portrays an existential dilemma of youth, using autobiographical data, harping
upon indigenous social behavior – the seed bed of art for Khupse and a host of
other contemporaries, who adopt the strategies of researchers, lost in the
woods, as it were. In the case of Khupse, the search extends to ritualizing air
and water, which are treated as sacramental substances in his largely
elementarian art.
A faint lament, even self-mockery is discernible
in Khupse‘s work where, trivial episodic moments are given significance and in
an enunciatory mode that is a short, pithy statement. The condensation of
meaning in figure-stance in action and in thumbnail-sketch patterns is a means
to withhold direct and banal communication. A clear-cut or literal
representation of an inner life of an individual is sought but not in easy
equations of colour, form or expressivity. There is a controlled deadpan
mildness in the watery aerosphere inhabited by the self and others – a taking
of distance, an allusion to alternative stratagems of relating.
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He has intuitively adopted the position of the
artist-in-exile, and that of the observer seeking, a provisional and mobile
balance between the individual and his social environment.
Khupse has also placed himself as a character in
the non-event like stories. This kind of self reflection offers a back and
forth understanding of conditions in which the artist wants to intervene.
The pulls and pressures, sanctions and
opportunities, are amplified in a homespun sociology that is build up with
motifs like the hour-glass, the flower petal, the braid. They represent mental
space, shelter, help-line or entrapment.
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Khupse’s works use these constant devices as he
takes recourse to otherwise straightforward exposes of dream, waking life and
desire. This artist suggests new ways of dealing with figurative references
that crystallize into terse ditties that are more than expository and
programmatic. The cameos breathe from the spaces of memory, remembering and
repeating the phrases of pictorial devices.
As written by Roshan Jagatrai for Aniket Khupse.