Artwork Details

"When lines go for a walk - Artscape of a painter"  / Ravindra Salve

    -     by Gautam Chatterjee, senior art connoisseur

Paul Klee used to say, ‘my lines go for a walk’. In Indian cultural milieu, it is rare to find walking lines after the era of Abanindranath Thakur. After a long melancholic gap, I witnessed such lines as the reflections of white soul where resides the white bird trying to fly in a white sky.

This is the entire creative canvas of Ravindra Salve, a young and intuitive poet of painting who loves to be pure in his log-in lines.

His canvas is wide, comprises the horizons of white shadows of excruciating pain and its silhouette reliefs. His subconscious metaphors are fables of love, un-experienced and un-manifested. This invisible charm is conspicuously visible in all his drawings, sketches, paintings and even in his frozen-dance-like sculptures. He uses mnemonic words from his pleasant memory in his colours to re-absorb all hearts from the watching/moving eyes.

Graduated in drawing, painting, sculpture and modelling from Sir J. J. School of Art, Mumbai, Ravindra likes to be an offspring of the basic teachings of this school. As his drawings reflect the standard nuances of this school, one must recollect that this institution has been evolved in drawing first with the dedication of John Griffiths, the then principal of this school. This school of drawing was quite different to the Bengal school of art in mid ninetieth century. Here, even in Ravindra’s drawings, one can easily find the depth of intricacy in carving curves with transparent gallery of white space, unlike Bengal school.  Walking mood is here.

If one comes across his lengthy list of solo and group exhibitions, smiled in different prestigious art galleries, one can trace in comfort that his walking mood is aesthetically prolific. Human faces are ancient, typical, mythological and a bit mongoloid. Neither colours nor the minds are anaemic, on the contrary, figures offer a touch of bright heart encapsulated in a dew-like dream in tranquillity. Mythic characters invite viewers to be sahridaya with the presence of light. Even black thick lines of anatomical animals are so lively that one becomes automatically a sahridaya, the aesthete.

The viewer as well as art connoisseur attains the same feeling with his paintings. It says, no wisdom exists like silence. Almost all eyes are closed here to portray the devotional amygdale of eastern human tradition from time immemorial. Here one can assert for the beautiful attributes from folk and regional traditions likewise Rajasthan and other artscapes rendering the musical notes of medieval historic abstraction. These are the images from the unmanifest. Ravindra seems to depict what people can not perceive through their ordinary or immediate eye, but like to witness the beauty behind the curtain.  It is revealed here. Before that it was veiled by the creator himself ontologically. Ravindra does not follow his own presupposes. He feels, the background should be foreground. He believes, love finds its own way towards creation. He rests, when his lines go for a walk.

His collection is fabulous. He is rich in this sense he can offer any treasure from the white clouds of his intimate home. He intimates art lovers about his labyrinth of sound memory dissolved in his sculptures. I find Pratyabhigyan (re-cognition) in all his human and animated brains engulfed in meditated skulls. The cerebral silence is again here to make you speechless. Here meaning is inherent, and carving in immanent. They inspire that which is sacred within. They are quite reluctant to walk further.

Though Ravindra shuts his eyes in order to see, I open my heart in order to contemplate on these artbeats. Creative wishes…