Kashinath Salve

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.