Lokesh Khodke

To begin with, over the course of my practice as a painter, I have come to realize that the way in which we live our lives or confront its various dimensions definitely reflects in our work. Speaking of myself, I feel that life around me has created several questions within me, and with time these queries have led to an unknown discomfort regarding my own complacent notions about life and language of art itself.

What then becomes a compelling area of interest in my work is the question of space and their inter/contradictory relationship with object, time and people. Within my work I try to address this area both at a subjective as well as formal level. Another issue that has come up again and again while exploring this area is space and the complex power relationships that go with it, an issue that I feel needs to be addressed genuinely in contemporary times. As an artist what becomes a challenge for me is how to look at the marginalized spaces within this power struggle which have, over time, pushed in the background through a process of homogenization which is increasingly becoming an integral part of our society.

I cannot claim that the present set of works do justice to what I say, yet for me it’s a beginning which will open up other possibilities. 

Sathyanand Mohan

During the last two years I have been trying to evolve a language that is flexible enough to address both the personal and the political at different levels. The making of a work involves not just personal choices and decisions, but also an understanding of its context, its position vis-à-vis the time and place as well the channels of exchange where it is situated and gathers its meanings.

A main area of interest for me is the human subject, and one part of my work deals with the problems and possibilities inherent in the representation of people, people who I know intimately, and who form a part of the social milieu that I as a painter inhabits. These people are mostly writers, artists, art historians and so on, who can be broadly categorized as belonging to a generic ‘intellectual’ class (if one could call it a class at all). They belong to an intellectual milieu, and insofar as they have been represented, my works (the portraits) could also be understood as trying to give form to the idea of the vocation of the artist/intellectual, what it constitutes, and what its relation to the present is. It is therefore, also a way of reflecting on my own practise, and of locating it within a concrete social world within which I operate and which gives me a sense of my own selfhood. So the genre of the portrait permits me to address the supposed antinomies of the self, or the personal (the ‘sitters’ are all people I know well), and the world, or the political/social (the ‘sitters’ have a well defined public role). The portrait is also a historically ‘rich’ genre, a genre that has been re-invented by almost every generation since antiquity, and it continues to be particularly germane territory for artists who situate themselves in that indeterminate zone that lies somewhere between the private and the public.

Another kind of work that I do is what may perhaps be called private metaphors wherein I try to evoke various aspects of the self and attempt to work it out at the level of the visual in a somewhat playful and ironic manner. Play and Irony are generally employed, in literature and painting, to draw attention to the language and its materiality. If nominally we are at present living under the sign of ‘realism’, then these works could be said to be trying to obscure that notion a little by bringing into play different registers of language(s) culled from quite different contexts and sources which are yet, somewhat like the uses of collage employed by the Surrealists, stuck together in the work by some notion of the ‘real’. The fantastic subject matter of works like “Portents”,- the sources of which are, among other things, those medieval broadsheets illustrating the apocalypse-to-come (strange signs in the sky etc.),- allows me to suspend the gravity of the real, and permits me the liberty of engaging in some play acting of my own.

Ashutosh Bhardwaj

Though my works always provide equivocal meanings and interpretations, but they defiantly respond to the contemporary Cosmo and metro surroundings around us.
               The clichéd images projected to us through various forms of media, which serves as the imagolouge of the global socio-politics comes first to me as metaphors. While juggling with these media images, I always try to be conscious of keeping their clichéd ness alive. By doing  so there is a continuous attempt to use the meticulous strategies of these imagolouges as a tool, which can decode their own rationally crafted meanings, that automatically questions their unreal superficial existence around us. In this whole process I always prefer to keep a distance from the images and try to keep their gloss alive without any personal and real life touches, which help me to be at a place from where I can point up the power and violence in the contemporary life. My sheer interest in precise, sharp, meticulous geometry and various O.P. or other design references help me to create suitable unreal abstract spaces where these clichéd images can interact. In this interaction images from history (art monuments and artifacts) also gets indulge, the history which is with us as an accepted legacy.