Search for the Beyond

With his solo show coming up in Delhi’s Sridharani Gallery presented by the Bombay Art Gallery, artist Yashwant Deshmukh is all set to show his large scale works. From paper to canvas, from small scale works to large scale paintings- Yashwant has traveled a long way. JohnyML profiles the artist.

Face this canvas. Then you look at the artist with suspicion in your eyes. Is he trying to fool you? Is this a finished canvas? If so where is the image? Your eyes make an artillery attack on the artist. He stands there nonchalant. In his blue denim shirt and cotton pants, Yashwant Desmukh cuts a man-next-door figure. He does not answer your questions directly. He smiles and asks you to look at the layers of paints. Now you turn your eyes once again to those paintings. You discern layers of various hues. And each variation in color reveals a form, flattened to the maximum. The outer surface looks like a thin film and you feel like putting some water on the canvas to remove that skin and see what lies beyond.

Yashwant Desmukh’s paintings embody the artist’s search for the beyond; the truth of things or the thing-ness of things. An unmindful viewer can just pass them off by calling them minimal expressions. The artist would perhaps agree with you, if you call him a minimalist. “Yes, I have done a lot of minimal works, like Malevich’s white on white, black on black, ochre on ochre,” says Yashwant. But those days have gone into the vaults of his personal memory. “I was trying to go beyond forms and catch the sense of a formless-ness as I used to paint a lot of expressionist figurative works during 1980s.” Once he felt that he has had enough of those white on white, he called it a day.

Perhaps, one cannot see any strong presence of nostalgia in Yashwant’s works. Nostalgia comes to the viewer through the thickness imageries, variation of colors and abundance of autobiographical references. Despite the absence of these elements, Yashwant’s works are informed and derived from his rooted-ness; his roots are still afresh in Vidarbha. As one gets the feeling of the midland summer from the poems of Arun Kolatkar or Keki Daruwalla, Yashwant’s works also emanate a feeling of summer; a summer scented by the smell of guava and mango. A summer of earthen pots that sit vacantly near the drought hit wells and look at the blazing sky. The feeling of summer in poetry is always appreciable, from Kalidasa to Kavya Viswanathan. Forget an empirical summer. Yashwant’s works are the depiction of a poetic summer, when lovers sing, dance and wait for their beloveds.

Yashwant builds up his images from the simple images around. When the mediatic realists opt for machineries and futuristic spaceships, Yashwant’s eyes look out for the simple things; a kite, a pot, tea cups, funnels, buckets etc. “They are objects and we do not see their object-ness. We submerge everything in use value. We fail to understand the thing-ness of things,” opines Yashwant. And his paintings, though a layering technique, build the thing-ness of things.

According to Yashwant, he has been looking at the landscapes around him. He wanted to capture the essence of nature without attempting to paint trees or hills. He even wanted to get a landscape without perspective accuracy. Attempts towards it, took him to nowhere other than his mind. Like J.Swaminathan, he too reached to a space, which is a space in the mind, which could be called a meta-scape.

Black and various shades of white dominated Yashwant’s palette during the last few years. Now he has moved on. Violets, blues and pinks have started appearing in his works. “Working with colors is quite laborious. There are no sweeping strokes in my works. I build each part of it using small brushes. Each color has to be treated like a guest, always on alert to keep their egos satisfied. Sometimes, I deliberately create the images to cover the whole pictorial format so that there would be a sense of imbalance in them. The viewer has to really look for a comfortable point from where they could enter the work,” says the artist.

Yashwant Desmukh’s works do not deal with the here and now. They are philosophical and poetic. The more you look at them, the more you are intrigued. This artist has walked through the paths of fire and brimstone after having a Bachelor Degree in Fine Arts from the Sir.J.J.School of Art, Mumbai. He kept on working without thinking much about material success. Yashwant is more philosophical when he talks about those days, “Any given period of time has its own cultural choices. A society educates itself to appreciate different cultural expressions and it is not a speedy affair.” Yashwant lives and works in Mumbai and his works are major collections.