The eighth iteration of Abir India’s First Take 2024 is about to engulf the vivacious city of Ahmedabad. This event is more than just a show; it is a demonstration of the ability of art to erase boundaries and captivate hearts. It’s important to consider Abir India’s extraordinary journey to this point as the expectation grows. Out of scores of entries, about 100 works would be picked by the eminent jury from India. The jury will select the best out of the lot and ten awards in total are awarded.
The show will also bring art lovers together, with dialogues, discussions and demonstrations with senior artists, art historians, art critics, curators and investors. For the First Take 2024, one among the eminent Jury is Manish Pushkale. Let’s know more about him and see what expertise he has to offer in Abir India’s First take in 2024.
Artist Manish Pushkale talks about art education, aesthetic vision, and the discursive geography of the contemporary in an interview with Digvijay Nikam.
In one of his most beautiful essays Meditations on the Frame (1943), the philosopher José Ortega y Gasset described the Spanish painter Darío de Regoyos as “that humblest of painters, the Holy Father of dirt clods and forest groves, who, it seems would get down on his knees in order to paint a cabbage.” This article is not about Regoyos, nor forest groves, not even a cabbage. It is about another humble painter, who, it seems would die in order to paint a dot.
One of postcolonial India’s finest abstract painters, Manish Pushkale did not come to the arts through the conventional route. Born in 1973 in Bhopal, Pushkale is a trained geologist. However, the seeds of an artistic sensibility were made apparent to him very early in his life. Sitting in his studio, Manish recounted those formative years in school where he “started giving importance, without realising the importance of it, to acts that suit [him].” He realised soon that painting was one of them. His potential was recognized wherever he went. Yet it was not the acknowledgement of the world he was waiting for but the confirmation of an inner yearning that he experienced later in Bharat Bhavan. He remembers with fondness his first visit to the institution. It was his father who had taken him and he says, “I realised this is an absolutely different kind of world but this is the world I had been looking for, I was starving for the air and smell of that kind.”
As someone who has not had the training of art schools, Pushkale’s parameter of learning has far exceeded the bounds of the educational apparatus wherein the role of Bharat Bhavan has been indispensable to the cultivation of his ingenious artistic sensibility. Therefore, he has come to identify himself as the product of an institutional process rather than a generalized academic system. Roaming ‘aimlessly, fearlessly, and helplessly’ in the galleries and premises of Bharat Bhavan, Manish learned to look at art, to distinguish between a Bhupen Khakhar and a Manjit Bawa, to bring dance and music to interpret a painting.
An exposure to this incredible environment of ideas went alongside his deep interest in the geography of the world, giving rise eventually to a personal aesthetics. For instance, his abstraction has tried to rethink the notion of conventional landscape painting. In his eloquent and confident tone, he insists that so far, the whole history of landscape painting has been about depicting the world that exists above the horizon. However, his geological and archaeological sensibility has pushed him to query the world that exists below the horizon. He does not deal with the verdant topography of Regoyos, rather “To me, my landscape is below the horizon,” says Pushkale.
Look at the painting above. The indecipherable forms and variegated shades of his colour palette suggest, as if, one is witnessing relics buried deep within the recesses of the earth. Maybe this is why Pushkale believes that the “traces, the memory, the essence of [his] civilization is in the dark.” Here it becomes clear that the vocabulary that distinguishes the geologist and the artist in him has no relevance for interpreting Manish or his works that often decry the inseparability of the two.
These paintings are not only reflections of the invisible topographies beneath our feet but also sincere projections of the artist’s inner geography. Anxieties, jouissance, boredom all find expression here. In his more recent work, Metaphors of my Terrain from the series ‘Tracing the Cartographer’s Trail’ we see the employment of the motif of the running stitch associated with the kantha tradition of embroidery. Spread over a surface coloured in reds, ochres, and umbers, what terrain do these countless stitches and dots conjure? As a spectator, the aesthetic experience is quite unique; it lies not only in being drawn to the image in front but also in being taken to the site of the making of the painting. As the eye follows each layer, each stitch, we are invited imaginatively to do it, to see him doing it, and partake in the seisms of his inner earth.
Pushkale has repeatedly drawn attention to the inadequate and cliqued vocabulary on abstraction and figuration in contemporary art discourse. In his view, the formula-based discussions that restrict figuration to the contours of anatomy do disservice to the task of understanding art. In another interview recounting a striking remark by the late Akbar Padamsee, Manish said: “This is a hand if you see the contours but if you go into the microscopic inspection of it, it will become an abstraction.” How do we prepare a taxonomy for such antinomies?
While explaining his work in relationship to Bharat Bhavan as an abstract-centric space, Pushkale in an interview gave an example of abstract poetry in Bhopal. He called it a literature of Parikrama, where you take one thought and revolve around it and in that revolution you evolve. His aesthetic sensibility has tried to emulate this Parikrama and present it on the canvas. This explains why he says that he belongs to a school of thought where the emphasis is more on organicity than narrativity.
A question that immediately arises on confronting his work is: what motivates this individual to undertake such painstaking effort? ‘Hunger,’ is Pushkale’s resounding answer; a hunger to know, a hunger to paint, a hunger to think despite all the failures, all the fear. In a characteristically humble utterance, he once admitted, “I am the greatest example of a painter who is failing at the deepest level of creativity and I am enjoying it.” Hunger, he tells us, is the oldest form of purity this world has known. It was this hunger that forced him to bunk classes in school and flee to Bharat Bhavan. It was this hunger and passion that was to cultivate his unique aesthetic vision.
Pushkale laments that often this hunger and vision is lacking in the young artists he encounters. In contemporary times when avenues for the production, recognition, and consumption of art have only improved, he notices in young artists a kind of confidence, an awareness of political correctness in positioning themselves, and a sense of fashion. “All these things are fantastic,” he says, “but I have a problem with this fantasy and this kind of phantasm. I have a problem with this confidence. There should be some fear inside, some pain, some fire and a lack inside.”
Since that first visit to Bharat Bhavan as a young boy, Manish has charted a long journey, achieving substantially along the way. He has held several solo exhibitions and has been featured in numerous group exhibitions in the most prestigious galleries in India and abroad like Bodhi Art, Delhi and Mumbai; Gadfly Gallery, Perth; Aicon Gallery, New York; Gallery Espace, New Delhi; National Gallery of Modern Art, Mumbai to name a few. He is a recipient of the AIFACS Award, Ministry of Culture’s Research Fellowship, Artist in Residency from Govt. of France (EGIDE-2004), Artist in Residency from Govt. of Italy. Furthermore, he is also a Trustee of The Raza Foundation in Delhi and a former member of Garhi Studio Selection Committee (2008), Lalit Kala Akademi, Ministry of Culture.
After an illustrious career like this, contemporary times have raised an interesting problem for artists in Manish’s view. In a time when we are dominated by visuals, when the distinction between a poster and painting is shrinking, what does the visual artist produce? And more importantly, what does it even mean to be a visual artist in this age?
For Manish, the goal is to stay relevant, to keep his vision fertile, and to keep his hunger alive. It is inspiring to witness the remarkable conviction of this artist coloured in his reassuring modesty. Perhaps genuine humility is the only ground for sincere confidence, to claim what is mine and to know that nothing is insignificant.
To conclude, I am reminded of Van Gogh’s honest expression that takes us to the core of Manish Pushkale: “I want something more concise, more simple, more serious; I want more soul and more love and more heart.”
