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Circling The Mountain Of Light

Ranjit Hoskote in the catalogue essay contributed to Yashwant Deshmukh’s solo show, titled ‘Circling the Mountain of Light’ at Bombay Art Gallery, Mumbai, looks at how the artist engages himself with the pure forms and poetry of nature. Hoskote says that Deshmukh took off from where Prabhakar Barwe left.

The light that animates Yashwant Deshmukh’s paintings is filtered through cloud, tinctured with shadow. The faint penumbra that attends many of his objects accentuates, instead of softening, the suddenness and irrefutability of their advent. And although his paintings are thought experiments devoted to the life and afterlife of these objects, bodied resonantly forth in spaces as perfect as illusions, his deepest yearning is for the consolations of landscape. The curve, mass and density of the vessel-like forms that he culls from the kitchen shelf and the window ledge suggest, not the civility of the still life, but the earth’s turning profile seen from the air, the topography of valleys and summits unfurrowed by the devastations of progress. Cast in deep-welling black or incandescent blue against a smoky field, Deshmukh’s bowls, pails, pots and funnels move beyond the thickness of substance and aspire to the intensity of presence.

The form that has most captivated Deshmukh’s imagination in recent years, and which recurs in various avatars in the paintings that comprise the present exhibition, is the heap. An elegant mass of grain, sand or shells, it manifests itself as a refined geometric device, or, in more robustly earthy vein, as a mountain. This is an image of teeming infinity, composed as it is of immeasurably many particles; at the same time, it becomes an icon of incalculable potential energy, when we think of what might happen if its constituent particles were to be excited to the point of fission. And stable as it seems, the heap retains the capacity to amplify its volume and accumulate power while preserving its shape. Here is a form that communicates both the solidity and transition, the permanence and flux of the universe: it incarnates, simultaneously, a being-there as well as a being-in-process.

The heap is a memoir of the farmland life that Deshmukh knew as a child growing up in Vidarbha, in the scorching interiors of Maharashtra. It carries visceral associations, for him, with hayrick, anthill and grain store; it acts as an archive of sensations, and of insights into the cyclical processes of growth and decadence, seeding and harvest. If Deshmukh builds an understanding of these perennial cycles into his art, he also draws grave and beautiful play from the dialogue of universal opposites: the rhythm of his paintings is often one of counterpoint between mistiness and the sharp line, the solid and the swirling; indeed, to deploy the expressive categories of the Lingayat saint-poets who viewed the universe as a ceaseless drama of fixity and flux, of sthavara and jangama. I am put in mind, particularly, of the recent painting in which Deshmukh juxtaposes a heap or cone with an axial pole that is churning up an eddy: these could be toys or utensils, but they also serve up a manthana, an image of world-formative churning that is at once domestic and cosmic in its tenor.

In another painting, powerful in its use of ultramarine, the artist explores the contrast between that which is contained and that which is unconstrained. In the upper right-hand corner of the frame is a bowl that holds a freight of blue, with a nimbus of rubbed charcoal around it, its existence safe within the assurance of position and dimension; balancing the composition diagonally in the lower left-hand corner, we find a heap or mountain of blue, about to radiate, explode or evaporate, charged with its volatility and freedom.

In the course of a career spanning twenty years, Deshmukh has made several crossings between symbolic figuration and symbolist abstraction. He has traversed from the lyrical discourse of an abstractionist tutored in mysticism to a poetics of reserve, formulated at that horizon where words pause for breath. Far greater than the volume of what you see, in his art, is the volume of what you don’t.

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On graduating with a BFA from the Sir Jamsetjee Jejeebhoy School of Art, Bombay, in 1988, Deshmukh found himself afloat in an art situation that was soon to be torn between the competing claims of conceptualist practices and a revitalised painting. This was not an easy time to be an abstractionist in India. In the warfare between video, installation and intermedia works on the one hand and the pictorial fictions of an embattled yet resurgent painting on the other, abstraction soon fell by the wayside. Although blessed with a few gifted and innovative exponents, it seemed to have run through its gamut of possibilities.

Who sits at the table of abstraction today? With the exception of a few committed practitioners who explore questions of form and sayability, the elusiveness of the numinous, the formation and dissolution of archetypal symbols, and the visionary possibilities of the landscape transformed itself into a notation for a grander music, abstraction in India has become a refuge for makers of pleasant pictures that are often exuberant in execution but quite innocent of meaning. Abstraction, if practised without philosophical rigour and conceptual finesse, degenerates into mere gestural play or worse, decorative twaddle. As against these studies in decline, Deshmukh demonstrates what an abstraction powered by philosophical curiosity can achieve.

He treats his pictorial surface as a laboratory where the traces of memory and the residues of desire may be tested for enduring value and refined in the fire of inquiry. His paintings are wagers on infinity, conducted on a scale that is manageable without being tame. The rim of a bowl could be the event horizon of a collapsing star; the outside edge of a ladle could be the path of a planet transiting through space; the funnel could be the portrait of a tornado as a monument of cataclysmic repose. A quality of music or poetry inhabits Deshmukh’s paintings: consider his sophisticated visual rhymes, the assonances and alliterations that he plots within individual works and across the suite, as in the painting that proposes a diagrammatic view of three hills, each developed in strokes suggestive of the chain stitch, and set against a field that reminds us of the smeared walls of village houses.

Deshmukh picks up where Barwe left off. Does the mind impose its obsessions on the world and so produce reality; or does reality insert its objects into the mind and produce the self? Does the world migrate into being from the hinterland of our dreams; or are we figments of an unfolding dream that we call the world? At what point do shadows resolve themselves into definite things, at what point do we end the hostage dramas of illusion and delusion? From what storehouse of impressions do certain motifs spring: are they hard-wired into the consciousness by ethnic memory or the experience of childhood, or are they garnered as the self voyages through seasons of despair and hope? Can we understand our interior dramas of menaced poise and naked imbalance better by externalising them as images? The instruments of Deshmukh’s inquiry are acrylic, charcoal and marble dust; but, above all, there is his restrained palette, which is not so much a chromatic choice as it is an education in refinement. It affects us more through its hints than its statements; it invites us to savour, not grey, blue or brown so much as the textures of seep and scumble, the gradation, vanishing and resurgence of colour.

Deshmukh circles the mountain of light in these paintings, the marrow of things, and it is visible only by inference. But stay a moment; you might catch a glimpse of it. Look out for the mountain positioned like a handkerchief picked from Magritte’s cabinet, the gullies in the rock softened to folds of cloth. Anything may lie concealed beneath it: a rabbit, a ruined city, a throbbing heart torn from a bull, or a glass of still and very clear water.