Reviews, features and shows.

The two talented participating artists in the present show, Keerthi Kankipati and Uday Bhaskar Pendem make successful efforts in creating optically convincing illusions of reality simulating and assimilating what they have seen and experienced. Both artists painstakingly reconstruct narratives, capturing them through extreme photographic reality. This mode essentially necessitates the artists to use their adroit skills and precise focus on re-presenting the simulated reality or the improvised illusion, enhancing the visual sight and the appropriated/desired imagery. The paintings exhibited here create a sense of tangible solidity and substantial presence of substances that are familiar to us. Their clever use of volume, tactile quality and subtlety of chiaroscuro all manifest ensuring a complex understanding of real and natural.

As a popular genre, ‘Photorealism’ made its way into the mainstream in the late 60’s reacting to the high modernist tendencies and minimalist emotive intuitions in Western Art. It threw a challenge to mediumistic advocacy by delivering an alternative and innovative means for revolutionary insights into conventional drawing, painting and modernist montages particularly photo-graphic media. This curious visual feast allows the viewer to engage both aesthetically and critically. Due to its possible variants within the realm of illusion the genre is at times labeled, if not rigidly categorized, as Super-Realism, New-Realism, Mediatic-Realism and Hyper-Realism. However, the aspect of ‘intermedial’ simulation and the virtuosity with a certain kind of technical and semi-technical exploitations that are central to the incessant fruition of the both painting and sculpture challenge these arbitrary labels.

The magnificent set of paintings exhibited here fall in the lines of above said genre that is predominant in Post-Modern Art in India. Both artists explored the artistic trends during their post graduation in the College of Fine Arts and learnt the newer ideologies disseminated by their mentors. These recent paintings demonstrate their artistic insight as the use of imagery appears to be apolitical in nature but the very selection of it intends to create a dialogue about the status quo of artistic practice in the region. They are neither decorative nor ethnographic in character, but certainly resonate their personal experiences in the bubbling urbanity. Their approach to painting is very simple and modest but the study of rich tonalities is much more complex and reveal the true character of the objects they paint. The visual vocabulary for their naturalistic renditions is derived from ‘real’ via high-definition photographs and is sincerely replicated to show how real the unreal images are. For them anything and everything is an art piece in itself, it is only at the viewer’s behest that the objects unravel and explore the un-known dynamics that these ordinary things hold. As is evident, the hyper-realistic treatment of the banal objects creates a sense of deception, where the accurate tactile quality mesmerizes the viewer. The minute tonal differences become a means to create a sort of illusionistic/harmonious blend of real and unreal. Both artists effortlessly grasp the play of light and the changeability of the hues under different light sources.