Vilas Shinde’s ‘Voyage into Silence”

Vilas Shinde’s new series of works, entitled ‘Voyage into Silence’ on view at Mumbai-based Gallery Art & Soul presents a distinct facet of his art practice that involves exploration of a wide variety of emotions or states of being; inner human actualities that he had engaged with as well as the secret features of outer nature, notes art critic Keshav Malik in an accompanying essay.
The writer elaborates: “For those who have known the body of his fairly large works, also know that they are full of half -tints as it were…Vilas Shinde appears to steal away and to be always hiding something he lived through. But what he explores and expresses to the hilt is that what may be termed at times our uncommon humanity, the entire spectrum of humankind’s deeper states of soul, moods, gestures and postures.

All lights and shades will be found in his repertoire barring, that is, his training period with its usual complement of academic studies. Indeed a rich vein of empathy appears to have been evident in his mental makeup from his very first painterly steps. To find maturation as works of art, that is as raw life experience transformed into convincing and creative statements. Thus, at his chosen best, the artist combines in a single, well-tied knot a host of honeyed life meanings. His work resists temporal erosion. He reveals himself only by subliminal feelings.

The feel goes deep, metaphorically speaking. The maker in him wants to assure us of the truth and authenticity of what is confided to him as person. Through his works run the refrain that the reason of the heart is possible; this way he convinces us of the relevance of certain timeless intuitions, but there is no blatant message in it!

Now if the artist is reluctant to speak to us directly, he is ever ready to plunge into deep experiencing. Works like his are proof of art’s attunement to earth. And in this sense he appears not as a superficially modern Indian artist but an essential one, Malik concludes.