Avinash Mokashe

Portrait as a genre offer a field in which the face or countenance can be interpreted to suit the artist's concept in his representation as an archetype of the mask; the simulacrum of presence that is the ubiquity of the generic portrait head; keeping alive the memory, or the dimension of the sacred and magic. It is in the realm of the sacred that Avinash's portraits can be bracketed. His portraiture translates as his subliminal expression. His inventiveness and creativity is in the fulfillment of this form of mental activity that he realizes as higher reaches of his spirituality. Therefore his works are neither allegorical nor do they profess to convey political or social activism. At the foundation of his practice, however, is an archetypal image of a sacred icon encountered by Avinash in the temple in his hometown. This is the image of Shiva in one of his avatars of which he is a devotee. The paintings are not provocative, rather contemplative, evoking the presence of the sacred with his visual vocabulary that engages either male or female figures in half bust size with eyes closed or in a meditative gaze or with a distant look, which contours his compositions with simplicity, to create his pantheon of iconography. It is the fundamental forthrightness of his vision, the innate conservatism of the form in its iconic posturing that imparts a distinctive character, simultaneously providing the visual appeal. The female portraits evoke devotees in contemplative prayer with their deity, as in the painting a kalasa/vase metamorphoses to represent the sacred icon with offering of flowers and not the traditional coconut. The female forms also evoke sentiments of nostalgia through closed eyes and a charming smile liltingly playing on their lips. As he has progressed with this genre, it can be witnessed that Avinash has moved away from his mottled and abstract colored backgrounds to portray houses and other elements of nostalgia of his hometown. His figurative idiom is linearly articulated, with areas of softly modulated colors within the spaces. The colors are distinct and vibrant with a strong folk resonance. The paintings at best exude charm and subliminal sobriety. Avinash's works are marked by vibrancy, ethnicity, color melange, subtle poetry, linear elegance and undeniably the individualist trace of the artist in terms of his brushwork and the theme that he chooses to work with. Avinash's scrutiny is bound to his brush work remaining a fully active participant, always testing the breadth and depth of what he knows engaging his medium, which is jute pasted on plywood and primed for texture and painted in acrylic. His tools are brush and the rubber roller. His works offer a symbiosis of relationship between traditional imagery and his contemporary sensibility which distills the culture of his environment. The compositions implicate a decorative scheme especially in the ordering of space. The rich i