Overview

Dilip Ranade is a connoisseur of the whimsical and the idiosyncratic. In his present body of works, the artist invites us into a domain, where strange redemptions await us. He savours every hallucination that uncovers the truth about normality, every eccentricity of behaviour that can offer us an oblique insight into the condition of being richly human in an epoch of brutalising turbulence. Ranade’s works inhabit the conscious decisions and unconscious gestures of daily life; it veins the relationships and transactions through which we record our presence in the world.

Through his allegories, we attend to the versatility of the human subject, as relayed through the alternately tender, amusing, melancholy and hair-raising stories of our lives. If Ranade addresses a cultural doubleness or multiplicity, he also addresses the binary situation of gender, both in the relationship between men and women, and in terms of the potential instabilities of sexual identity within the individual. The erotic has been a powerful strain in his work for over three decades, declaring it in several nuances including obsession, jubilation, disquietude and unabashed pleasure. In Ranade’s handling, the figure often assumes the form of a model or a mannequin, as though it were to be held at a distance for objective inquiry while remaining in play as an object of desire.