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.

Works

Notes

Artist Note

Considering multiple ideologies entangled in each other, constantly changing ideas and philosophies in art, I prefer to rely on a personal idea of art, that is to express something based on ‘my’ experience which would be more authentic.

 

Animals played and still play quite an important role in my work. I think they facilitated my maintaining a distance from the human figure particularly in terms of expression. The audience being human beings (at least so far) they cling to a human figure and associate too closely and miss peculiarity of relationship and expressions. Whereas the animal image becomes a symbol of it’s trait and is a personification too. It oscillates between these two points projecting both the aspects simultaneously.

 

Many a times my attempt is to create an enigmatic situation in a painting where the images or characters besides physical closeness are connected with gesture or through expressions. I also intend to create complex relationship among images or objects and for those to be metaphors too. To experience this mystery and puzzle the viewer’s emotional participation is essential. However, the artist’s responsibility is to lead the viewer to the threshold of the known and hint at possible directions to explore, through his art-works.

 

Dilip Ranade

Venue

Threshold Art Gallery

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