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Kashinath Satyavan Salve
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A labyrinth of forms
In the Indian art scene there has been a growing interest in national identity. Since Independence most young painters who were at one time drawn to the various contemporary western styles and who argued that modern art is an international language to be understood beyond all geographic borderlines and cultural differences are slowly turning towards a national character.
This is so...
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A labyrinth of forms
In the Indian art scene there has been a growing interest in national identity. Since Independence most young painters who were at one time drawn to the various contemporary western styles and who argued that modern art is an international language to be understood beyond all geographic borderlines and cultural differences are slowly turning towards a national character.
This is so true of Kashinath Satyavan Salve, born in Ahmednagar in 1944, and who has had all his education in Bombay. He graduated from the Sir J. J. School of Art in 1968. When in his final year, he had the chance to see Mohan Samant’s paintings; Samant had brought a show to Bombay from Canada where he lives today. Salve got very interested in the technique used by Samant - the use of thread, and plaster of paris glued on paper and splashed with paint. From then on it has been one long journey in experimenting with techniques.
The 1970s saw Salve moving from painting to graphics, the reason being that it gave him greater scope for experiments with techniques and, besides, he realized that he had begun to copy Samant and could not free himself of it. At that time, he was fortunate to be invited to various art workshops held both in Delhi and Bombay. The works of this period - mostly abstracts - show an orchestration of a very familiar vocabulary of forms - houses, rooftops and, later, simplified and symbolic forms. An increasingly tactile surface emphasizes the physical stability of his works. They are neither rebellious nor complacent but constructed paintings.
Over the years, Salve’s work has developed a highly complex pictorial strategy that allows his works to be perceived not only as pictures but also as sculptures. We’re allowed, moreover, not only to look at them, at their representational objects?as?things but also, at one and the same time, to participate in the thinking of the concepts that are inherent in them. These are paintings to be contemporaneously seen, as thought, image and linguistic meaning balance against one another. Salve could be said not primarily to develop his paintings out of the process of looking but rather to construct them with the building blocks of concepts.
To want to assign clear-cut features to works of Salve’s art requires a will to clarify and integrate, for they are an assimilation of similar images. The attentive viewer begins to realize that he is caught up in a labyrinth of forms and each work refers to an infinite number of worlds. A form may call to mind a circle as a solar disc, a triangle as a mountain, a square to represent the world and a combination of these to represent the human being. These reliefs show a vast expanse of white background and a limited use of colours.
To neglect the use of colour is to neglect the joyous, almost amusing state of mind underpinning the work. The same philosophical awareness seems to have led Salve to shift from his near-colourless relief works to a more colourful palate in the nineties. The early nineties saw a series of still-lifes. Here again, Salve is talking to the peripheries - changing perspectives to address what remains just outside sharp focus. The painting is both a painting and a sign of painting, for the work is composed of a series of internal relationships.
Salve’s most recent work is myopically about itself, not merely as a formal development out of the reductive vocabulary but a development in which a very restricted range of light, constructive marks gradually give way to a loose, more varied range of brushstrokes and a more open sense of surface. There is no longer a foreground or a background, but an interim space, where the presence, the air remains. He builds up his work with swathes of dark, broken hues, vaguely suggesting landscapes which he has collected in his memory.
At present Salve is Professor of Painting and Drawing at the Sir. J. J. School of Art in Mumbai. Being in a transferable job, Salve spent ten years in Nagpur (1976-86), where he had little scope to pursue his interest in graphics. He shifted his attention to murals. Salve has always been interested in materials, and he has experimented with various media and techniques. His interest in ceramics led him to Bhadravati (in interior Maharashtra), where under S. Mirmira, Director of Ceramics, Khadi Gramodyog, he learnt the various possibilities that clay provided. The result was a ceramic mural for the Reserve Bank of India (Mumbai). Today when tension, anxiety and uncertainty are commonplace in many parts of the world, perhaps such qualities as reason and restraint, symbols and decorative motifs, meet more basic human needs than is apparent at first glance.
In the mural for the RBI Salve has selected the subject of ‘growth’ - and, appropriately enough, foreground, middleground and background merge with one another. Salve has made use of reliefs of various depths and with a clever use of colour that appears to advance and recede simultaneously, he creates a continuous momentum. Space itself, rather than the position of objects within a spatial continuum, is one of the main interests of all contemporary artists, and Salve rightly treats space as just one of the ‘properties’ of his environment.
Speaking of the process of his work, he states, 'Again and again I find myself driven to shape materials, to give them an artistic form. As I go deeper and deeper into the process of making a piece, the many different factors involved are in a flux in my mind. Somehow they make contact with each other and seem to join the fountainhead of my energy reserve, wherever it may be located.'
He cannot rest until the piece he is working on is finally done. When that happens he experiences a profound sense of relief and accomplishment. But that exhilaration is short-lived, because he is already thinking of his new project.
Whatever medium or mode of expression Salve selects, he approaches the content in a different way. Generally content refers to word, literature, myth, music etc., but what Salve expresses through his content is emotions - not necessarily abstract, but rather looking at light, as one can look at sound, with a purity.
The problem of non-verbal content is definitely one of the problems of art, and has been for a long time. To Salve this is a challenge to achieve an individual style that will eventually depict his own personality.
- Rajani Prasanna (Professor, History of Art, Chitra Kala Parishath, Bangalore)
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Born
April 28, 1944
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Education
1968 Government Diploma in Art, Sir J. J. School of Art, Mumbai
Exhibitions
Selected Solo Shows
2007 Cymroza Art Gallery, Mumbai
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Selected Solo Shows
2007 Cymroza Art Gallery, Mumbai
2000 Taj Art Gallery, Mumbai
1998 Jehangir Art Gallery, Mumbai
1996 Nehru Centre, Mumbai
1995 Jehangir Art Gallery, Mumbai
1992 Jehangir Art Gallery, Mumbai
1990 Jehangir Art Gallery, Mumbai
1989 Private Show, USA
1984 Under The Over Hotel, Mumbai
1983 Information Centre, Nagpur
1982 Kala Mela , 5th Triennale, New Delhi
1976 Jehangir Art Gallery, Mumbai
1975 Taj Art Gallery, Mumbai
1974 Jehangir Art Gallery, Mumbai
1973 Jehangir Art Gallery, Mumbai
1971 Jehangir Art Gallery, Mumbai
1970 Triveni Art Gallery, New Delhi
Selected Group Exhibitions
1988 Meguro Museum of Art, Tokyo
1985, JTAG Cultural Centre, Jammu
1980 Uttar Pradesh Lalit Kala Academy, Lucknow
1979 Contemporary Artists from Maharashtra Exhibition, New Delhi
1973 Jehangir Art Gallery, Mumbai
1972 Lalit Kala Akademi, National Exhibition, New Delhi
1972 All-India Christian Artists Exhibition, Mumbai
1972 All India Fine Arts and Crafts Society (AiIFACS), New Delhi
1972 Jehangir Art Gallery, Mumbai
1971 Lalit Kala Akademi, National Exhibition, New Delhi
1971 Jehangir Art Gallery, Mumbai
1970 Jehangir Art Gallery, Mumbai
1970 All-India Christian Artists Exhibition, Poona
1970 Lalit Kala Akademi, National Exhibition, New Delhi
1969 Jehangir Art Gallery, Mumbai
1969 AIFACS Art Gallery, New Delhi
1969 Private Art Gallery, Mumbai
Participations
2010 'Contemporary Printmaking In India', presented by Priyasri Art Gallery, Mumbai at Jehangir Art Gallery, Mumbai; Priyasri Art Gallery, Mumbai
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Q. You paint canvases, murals and high-reliefs, and you also make graphic prints. Is there any particular reason why you express yourself in so many different media?
I love to experiment with different materials. I want to see how I express myself on different surfaces, see how the ideas in my mind are affected by a different medium. I love to explore different materials, feel their differing sensitivity. For me...
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Q. You paint canvases, murals and high-reliefs, and you also make graphic prints. Is there any particular reason why you express yourself in so many different media?
I love to experiment with different materials. I want to see how I express myself on different surfaces, see how the ideas in my mind are affected by a different medium. I love to explore different materials, feel their differing sensitivity. For me moving from one medium to another is no strain. I am striving towards what I will call "three-dimensional art."
Q. Can you elaborate?
My high-relief paintings are an example, just a preliminary example of course, of the direction that I want to explore. I am going to do more such work from now on.
Q.Which of these forms of expression do you enjoy working in most?
I love high-relief painting. It is interesting to me because it involves more than just paint. I have to use other materials like metal, wood, ceramic and see how I can make them combine aesthetically. I particularly like Satish Gujral's work in this mode, as well as Piraji Sagra’s, who, of course, is basically a sculptor. It’s a pity Gujral doesn't do high-reliefs as much now.
Q.Your work on canvas seems to tend towards the abstract, while your high-reliefs and murals are either referential or symbolical expressions of some idea or the other.
What never fails to fascinate me is what happens to an object when it is lit up from behind. The way light comes into view from the gaps in the object and illuminates the object. As a child I used to spend a lot of time in the woods in my village. The memory of the light playing through the trees may account for the way I treat light in my landscapes. Take my landscape, “Through the Window” (see alongside). As you can see, I am trying to catch a café lit up from within. And in front of it there are natural forms like trees. Just see how the light appears within the blocks of darkness. It is this effect that I try to catch again and again.
Q. You have done many murals. What is it about them that seems to fascinate you so much?
Apart from being inherently experimental, I have this feeling that buildings, or dead masses, gain some life, some motion, from decorative elements like murals. Murals also impart beauty into the otherwise drab living environment of cities. You know I have done the mural in the central lobby of the RBI building in Bombay. It took me four years of work to finish it. Murals are challenging because the area to work in is large, unlike a small canvas which calls for a lot of condensation.
Q. Which do you consider your best mural?
The mural on the door of the Indira Gandhi Institute for Development Research at Goregaon in Mumbai. It is a mural in copper, and using copper in a mural has its own challenges. As you can see, the symbol zero figures prominently in the mural. The zero is India's contribution to the world. You also see Chanakya’s sutras written out on the right hand side. I tried to connect these references to our past to the economy of the present day, how everything is interlinked, the environment, industry, banking, human relationships, everything…..I consider this mural my favourite, and my most satisfying mural upto now.
Q.You have been teaching almost all your professional life. In fact, you are equally well known as "Sir Salve." Do you enjoy teaching art as much as doing it?
I got into teaching by chance, you know. My performance in the graduation exam at J. J. School of Art got me a fellowship to teach there. And I have been teaching, and painting, ever since! But don’t get the wrong impression. I quite enjoy teaching. Moulding new artists and helping them on is yet another way of artistic self-expression for me. But it is possible that if I had not had to teach, I would have painted much more. In any case, I intend plunging into greater activity when I retire next year. The world still doesn't realize what I am capable of!
Q. How would you describe your current work?
I am working on several murals, and also doing small canvases and high-reliefs for an exhibition scheduled to be held in New York next year. The themes take on from the last book of the Bible, Revelations. You see, I have always been a pure artist. I have not done any social message work. But the world as it is now requires an interpretation which these paintings, I hope, will give. Look at the violence all around, killing for the sake of money, the lack of love for each other. There is collapse everywhere, almost like it is the end of the world. I want to portray this feeling.
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