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Fruitful Imaginings

Deepak Khatri’s imagination revolves around the food culture of the world. He sculpts images from a vast variety of food arrangements and forwards a critique of the consumer culture. In the catalogue essay for his forthcoming show at the MSU Fine Arts Gallery, Baroda, Sandhya Bordewekar details the aesthetics of his works.

There are many reasons why ‘food-for-thought’ could fall so ideally into a sculptor’s treasure chest of ideation. Food has an essential three-dimensionality to it, whether it is raw, cooked or presented for serving; whether it is fruit or vegetable, cereal or pulse, meat or fish. It is a basic human necessity and different communities have evolved and honed different ways of cooking and serving foods, as well as cultured extensive oral and written histories about their etymology that have come to create distinct identities for these communities. But one man’s food can also be another’s poison. In fact while some foods can be positively harmful, there are numerous very tasty examples of slow and steady killers. Sculptor Deepak Khatri has been exploring all these and more ever since he graduated in sculpture from the Faculty of Fine Arts, Baroda, in 2001.

Deepak’s engagement with the detailed exploration of foods, especially fruits, as sculptural subjects continues with an even greater fervent today. The inspiration as well as the subjects comes straight off the bazaar, and in that sense, the artist is completely grounded in contemporary reality of the every day. He looks at his ‘subjects’ from different perspectives – that of the pavement-side fruit-seller who carves or must one say, sculpts, his fruit-wares in mouth-watering shapes to entice buyers; that of the designer of the bloody ‘pineapple’ grenade that inspires the artist to give ‘armoured’ skins to bananas, pomegranates and grapes as well; that of the relationship of foods to idiosyncrasies of men and animals, for example as with bananas and monkeys; and that of the growing and worrying popularity of  ‘fast foods’ such as burgers and French fries leading to obesity and the myriad life-threatening health problems thus bred.

While he retains the general, identifiable organic shape of the ‘fruit’ he works on, he presents his own take on the same by manipulating its size, material used to create its form, and the metaphorical meanings he infuses it with. The shape and colour of the fruit, the nature of its pulp, the thickness and texture of its skin, the size of its embedded seeds – all of these become grist to this sculptor’s mill, their juicy volumes and attractive natural colours depicted with fidelity. He also looks at the conventional ways in which people deal with the fruits – peeling, slicing, cubing, de-seeding and so on, before consuming them. In his Sliced Fruits series (2004), for example, he examined the act of ‘slicing’ a fruit and re-arranging the slices while serving, bringing the two acts together as a sculptural statement. In the Construction of Imagination series (2006), he methodically ‘de-constructed’ the organic object to its basic core. A large wooden watermelon was constructed as a conglomeration of cubed pieces put back together and held in place by metal bands much in the manner of packed and sealed goods. For a long while, Deepak worked in wood with the form of the apple, sometimes working the surface as a pattern of cut fruit pieces such that it looked as if the apple was carefully cut open and then put together all over again

In more recent sculptures, Deepak has taken a somewhat darker view, where the ‘innocent’-looking objects don a more threatening mantle, as in the manner of the pineapple grenade. He rivets the fruits into thick armors of their own skins. So the banana in its armored skin appears more like a dangerous sickle, and the pomegranate’s ruby-red seeds tick ominously within the metallic shell.

The final sculpture is a carefully built-up complex presentation, often a mix of mediums, usually wood, fiberglass and metal, that skillfully complements each other.

Over the last couple of years, Deepak’s thematic concerns have also centered around the healthy options of eating natural foods as against the ‘fast food culture’ that has taken over life in urban areas. In this show, for the first time, there is cooked food – the ubiquitous burger, with lettuce leaf, cheese slice, patty, onion rings et al, in addition to an embossed image of an overweight Rodin thinker punched into the wooden bun. Also for the first time, Deepak has conceived of relief sculptures framed as paintings would be. One features, among other things, an obese Eve offering an equally rotund Adam a greasy burger. In another, Adam holds a huge key, perhaps to a healthier pantry. In yet another relief, rows of egg-shell ovals with obese figures carved on them, pulse and thrust against the wooden surface, their rounded stomachs and thighs exaggerated against the convex surface of the ovals.

There is no doubt that Deepak peppers his sculptures with a sharp sense of humour. This underlying note of humour is ironical in its comment, and it deftly connects the objects and the meanings they evoke such that the message, if there is one, is reinforced without degenerating into the ludicrous.