Shabda Brahma

Shabda Brahma 60X60 inch mixed-media on canvas 2008

The Shabda Brahma canvas can serve as an introduction to Vinod Dave’s show. It is shaped like a new scripture equating all the major religions practiced in India and relating those to things fine and bold in the lay world, inclusive of animals real - “ real as well as drawn from the artist’s private mythology, while misty layers of gentle, radiant illumination impregnate the whole with warm lyricism.

Except for this declaration of faith, the paintings center round iconic figures of Hinduism, however filtered through Dave’s memory of his youth in Gujarat and his contemporaneity in New York. Perhaps, the very fact that he spends most of his time in the West but comes here every year, has clarified and enhanced the essential trait of this religion and its wider circumference - “ the multi-faceted and ever mutating connectedness between the hieratic, canonic tradition and somewhat rough but exuberant life on the mundane plane. Dave looks at the permeability of both with frankness overwhelmed by poetry, with a slightly ironic humor made tender and indulgent thanks to acceptance and loving. Whereas traces of classical imagery of the divine can be intuited, he relies primarily on its reverberations in popular culture. Aesthetic elements of the former can be noticed directly in the finesse of the contouring line and its volume-suggestive shading or in near-quotations from the miniature styles, as in the high horizon with curly cumuli or rain poring down in straight parallels and punctuated by tiny, sharp bird silhouettes.

Otherwise, the painter transforms traditional borders into a loose, a little gestural abstract design or an ornate floral frame from the bazaar. He stews the surface with delicately schematic emblems of the present reality and letters mingling with residues of the symbolic past.
His Saraswati comes from Kalighat, though most other gods seem to have stepped out of the calendars and cinematic mythological to undergo an intimate appropriation from Dave’s hands. This happens through the means developed from photography, picked up among urban neon lights as well as sketched softly from the artist’s own nostalgia. An iconographically correct Sheshshayi reclines on a sleek automobile, whereas a private goddess of forests is a foreign lady comfortable in a sari. A Krishna in trousers and an overcoat plays flute and the Ramayana heroes endearingly crude in their filmi Technicolor reflect the human ethos around the rustic background.

Thus, a tinge of the exotic is counterbalanced and complemented by the authenticity of the naive, the kitsch simultaneously expressing the spirit of the latter and being maneuvered towards greater complexities with a feel of both amused-involved immediacy and generalizing distance. The vibrant, teeming stir held in suspense settles, yet, to a partly regular structure, so hinting at an eternal pulse of things micro within the cosmic, although this can be realized only as an aura, one largely dependent on the interaction of minute details and the expansiveness of the paintings. The quiet, joyful sentiment prevails, even when confronted or invaded by signs of mortal danger, the cannons, sacred weapons and modern pistols pointing at the gods and surrounding them to warn of external as well as internal belligerence.

Marta Jakimowicz in Deccan Herald