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Lines of Desire and Sacrifice

Shubhalakshmi Shukla looks at the works of Dilip Ranade exhibited in a solo show at Pundole Art Gallery, Mumbai and attempts to reveal the philosophical content in them while pepping up her review with the artist’s comments.

To ensemble the works of last three decades, Dilip Ranade prefers to entail the dialogue by Chitrang Khanolkar’s poetry on Tvacha Vesh. It means that the skin is like a garment which entails different kinds of roles and has to be discarded while one is no more.

He pointed at the drawing where male couples sitting opposite each-other are in embrace. They sit under an architectural column whose apex meets the starting point of two arches which would form a shelter above them. While he pointed at this drawing he remembered the fiction by Kafka -‘The Castle’, where the presence of twin-figures touches upon the philosophic duality of the self. Pointing at the philosophic notion of Advaita (undivided self), the artist interprets his own works through Kafka’s text.   

Inspite of the above philosophic end which gives an edge to the body of works on display, there is a discreet presence of the divided self within the artists approach. The  question of Distance and Time as true to the construction of self in physical time and ‘real’ space – what remains mystery is the presence of cosmic time which is non- linear, and cosmic structure which is unending, is where an absurdity takes birth.

According to Mr. Ranade and his pupil, early 1970’s was the historic moment in Indian Art when most of the Indian artists where influenced by pictorial devices that could emerge form Cubism. The notion of ‘Style’ that enlightened the European art Scene preoccupied Indian mind to assert their own and dig into once own history. So, a play of Eros and Thanatos as akin to the micro-level understanding of Hindu Philosophy; that also appeared strategically in a planned manner in the Eastern European film makers (like Passolini and Bergman) influenced Mr. Ranade.
Probably, the absurd Marathi theatre of 1970’s-80’s, does take a line from these existing examples of absurd aesthetics which also influenced Mr. Ranade deeply.
There has been a recurring context/s of the skin, the embrace, beauty and death in these films as well Indian artists of this time frame (see Akbar Padamsee, Somnath Hore).

On the other hand the absurdity takes residence in real life incidents when the artist’s senior colleague at the Natural History Department was charge-sheeted due to his underperformance. The artist was involved/observed the incident and what happens later he observed is a kind of interaction and communication through this senior colleagues skills.

Such is the mystery around the single line drawings of this artist. The planes and the protuberances, side flexions and the front bows examined and illumined as a trajectory of appearances that body could be framed into. It could also be a dialectic of three- dimensional geometry, its members as constructed in physical space that could not be calculated in a methodical or sequential order to resemble a methodical schema. 

In the Natural History section, at Bombay Museum Mr. Ranade is an expert in taxidermy and scientifically explains the process of removing the skin. He suggests an easy and philosophic way to paint and at the same time also keeps knowledge about the complex ways to organize a mannequin as a cage within taxidermy model.

In his earlier solo exhibition in 1999 he carried out experiments of making fossils. He created a jack fruit, a banana, a bulb, a telephone and a ladies brazier (auction for Marlyn Monore’s garments) , to suggest a fixity of particular object-design in a particular time.     

In 2004 solo, he cultivated a mammoth built structures in “the Lost Monuments in A Sweet City” wherein the apex of the tall (twin) towers turn into a male torso and a pumpkin. He had a prolonged admiration for Kafka in all these years and one of it is Kafka’s portrait.

He is one of the unique artists who could expose the surreal imagery as potent in content in our context. Those whose minds are haunted by creative surreal thoughts must find an eventful day at the Pundole Art Gallery where his works are on display.