MODEL Painting

Born 1963, Maharashtra, India. Yashwant celebrates the existence of objects that are part of his urban reality. He accentuates the lyrical and meditative elements of the object, and preserves the resonance in a monochromatic painterly treatment. This is an exercise in simplification of form. His objects become intimate autobiographical evocations that celebrate the poetry in our everyday reality. In most of his work the sculptural qualities are highlighted, and there is play with scale to make them larger than life. He celebrates the ordinary ubiquitous object and gives it iconic status. His objects grow beyond human scale and control. He limits his palette to a narrow range of tones which transform the objects into subtle poetic images; objects that symbolize the ordinary and are an extension of the body. The artist has been exploring the phenomena of spatial perspective, and dialogues with colours with precision and assurance. He is able to create an eerie stillness and silence with these objects of utility and beauty. The heavily textured background has an abstract quality that creates spatial dimensions to locate his objects in focus. The pictorial devices are largely monochromatic browns and grey. His quest for playing with space, texture and the angular linearity of the objects is meditative in quality. Design has become his term of expression and can lead to poetic perception in surface and depth. As a restless artist, Yashwant has been constantly reinventing himself and pushing the boundaries of his conformity. In his last show, the artist created a sculpture which was a classical cone, in charcoal black. The scale and the tactile material explored the volume and the void created by the object. In most of his early work the human presence was evoked by the object. The ergonomical design element of the object was central to his enquiry. He evoked the human presence by absence and invested in his objects to give an iconic presence, like a living entity. In his new series the human body is at the centre. The borders of the image define prana--life breadth inside and loka—the world outside. Again these are iconic images, silhouettes of human beings in situations of action or repose. Yashwant looks at all forms as divine manifestations. They occupy the colour field as two dimensional spaces and assert the human presence.