Friday, July 5, 2013

What defines the crux of Suryakant Lokhande’s art?

Instead of employing the images drawn from various sources in the physical world as they are, Suryakant Lokhande prefers to rework and repaint them in an instinctive manner. This kind of artistic transition and transformation is critical to his work. In general, it underlines the physical phenomena omnipresent in each individual’s immediate realm. For him, it does not remain contextual only in the present since he absorbs as an artist - even those faded and non-existent memories, as well as the peculiar phenomena of dazed dreams and fantasy – relevant to the present.

Often a photo is chosen as the base medium. The crux of his artistic process lies in first disowning the conventional notions of photography.  For this socially sensitive practitioner, a photo is not merely an instrument to dispassionately record a physical phenomenon in the distant outer realm or to derive a certain aesthetic value.

It serves him as a mirror to look into his own self. He picks an image in such a manner that it gets transformed into an objective correlative of sensations, giving a deeper and even a different meaning. His strategic usage of borrowed imagery and source material, devoid of irony, traverses the visual codes and styles made pertinent by his chosen environ, skillfully reworking them in order to re-assess as well as challenge set vocabulary and perceptions of representation.

The artist was part of an off-air environmental initiative by CNN channel in 2008, and created an artwork using recycled rubbish - a life-size tiger sculpture. The idea was to artistically reinforce the message of inventing creative solutions to deal with environmental degradation and to underline how recycling could be a beautiful thing.

On the other hand, his much-acclaimed series ‘The War is Over’ slammed the uncertain situations post-war, and referred to the predicament of a sensitive artist trying to push boundaries. Many of his works in it evoked the iconography of war and effects, playing out in our subconscious akin to that of a desktop computer screen when neutrality twists, distorts its world, whereas his body of work, entitled ‘Koham (Who am I?)’, revolved around the theory of life cycle before birth and after death.

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