Painter, Independent artist, New Delhi, India
Avril à Juin 2014
Manish Pushkale was born on the 26th of October 1973 in Bhopal, a place also known for the Bhopal Gas Tragedy, in Madhya Pradesh, India. He achieved his master’s degree in Geology. Without any formal training in art but with a powerful and sensitive initiation from the evocative environs of Bharat Bhavan - a multi arts complex in Bhopal, he evolved a language of abstraction which carries his own personal imprint.
His meticulous choice of colours used to layer works and his method of applying and wiping off paint, tangibly invokes complex meditations on asceticism- worldliness, renunciation -sensuality, presence-absence, dying-rebirth and so on. His works are a play of formal dichotomies like those of light-shade, mark-erasure, form-formlessness, restraint-excess, control-indulgence, which have now matured to a level that confronts and assimilates all these oppositions to achieve a state of refined harmony.
He is a Trustee of The Raza Foundation in Delhi. He lives and work as a freelance artist in Delhi.
Image and imagination
Being a painter Manish Pushkale deals with the experience of local visuals and space by the conglomerate of Images, Colors and Lines, play of tint and tones, which is finally resulting in a composition in different mediums on pictorial plane and termed as Painting. In Manish Pushkale’s paintings there is nothing polemic, no mordant irony, his art is singularly an exercise in warmth, directness, the pointedness of expression in sheer color that trims the terrain of the seamless. It turns out to be somber and innocent and unfathomably serious. Abstract art does not present products. Instead, it invites into conversation. There’s an unsettling splendor to this caliber of abstract art. It’s a tactile, glorious feel to try and imbibe the different sensations; this is more like hearing a canticle in a cathedral. The experience is also a little like treading water beyond the surf, riding the troughs and swells of sound, each working another wave. Swept along by an unseen current, you are towed into deeper water, until someone finds themselves amid a flotsam of old routines and riffs, half-remembered snatches of things, the wreckage of worlds and words. Manish Pushkale’s paintings are revealed by an excavation of the senses. The outstanding feature of his painting is Luminosity. The sense that one gets is that they are not lighted from outside but inside to the layering and transparency of colors. The entire painting itself becomes light. Though the paintings may be termed formless within the traditionalist framework of understanding from, the form in these paintings is actually created by the interplay of movement of light and sight for the viewer. This play is not linear; rather it is in a constant state of deliberate flux so that the square forms are in interaction with the background. They constructed and deconstructed as the eye moves from one to the other, and gets trained to focus and defocus on the canvas.
Is it a curious combination of transitory cognition of the fixed image that is prophetic in its impact on the viewer?