Sanjeev Sonpimpare's paintings were exhibited at Jehangir Art Gallery last December. The body of works had a strong presence of a virtual window that emerged out of a gradation of black to white tones.
Sanjeev employed this as an image itself, as if to symbolize victory of the computer over human hand, and then tried to defy it, by painting it himself. 'Something had to pass through the window', says Sanjeev, who chose the passing images. It began with a magazine cover, a reworked Mughal miniature painting, and went on to many other images. Individuals and styles that are said to have shaped the taste
of art-public in their respective times, Ravi Varma and Manjit Bawa, were under Sanjeev's gaze. The gaze of a painter who wants to outgrow the Mumbai- 1990s scene that shaped his generation. The same gaze comes upon sympathetically towards images that are closer to middle-class reality and challenges. The images that passed through those virtual windows had a curious connection with money/power and the lack of it. The Sceptics, as Sanjeev called the series, must have been an attempt for Sanjeev to reconcile his own aesthetic preference for working with surfaces, treating the image to be rendered in different ways, and his philosophical urge to ponder on life that he has observed and is living. The virtual that fragments the real into manageable pieces. However, the humour was overshadowed by the
quassi-surrealist looks.
Sanjeev's renderings looked somewhat loud. Did they have to be so, to amplify the presence of a human hand? Or was it because of the overpowering presence of tonal gradation in many of the paintings?
Sanjeev's recent works and his focus on life prove that Sceptics had a cathartic value for the painter himself.
- Abhijeet Tamhane
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