“I remember you from tomorrow.” Ratnadeep Adivrekar’

Artist: Ratnadeep Adivrekar

‘’For the memories themselves are not important. Only when they have changed into our very blood, into glance and gesture, and are nameless, no longer to be distinguished from ourselves only then can it happen that in some very rare hour the first word of a poem arises in their midst and goes forth from them.”

-        Rainer Marie Rilke

A   thought is a function of time, a pattern of growth, and not the thing that the lens of the printed word seems to objectify. It is more like a cloud than a rock, although its effects can be just as long lasting as a block of stone, and its aging subject to the similar processes of destructive erosion and constructive edification. Duration is the medium that makes thought possible, therefore duration is to consciousness as light is to the eye.

From the medieval vantage point, the post-Brunelleschi optical painting seemed to be not all here, the illusion of someplace else compared to the concrete, immediate, nondescriptive existence of the icon image. The physical apparatus of the moving image necessitates its existence as primarily a mental phenomenon. The viewer sees only one image at a time in the case of the painting and more extreme, only the decay trace of a flipping page in the video. In either case, the whole does not exist and therefore can only reside in the mind of the person who has seen it, to be revived periodically through his or her memory.

Conceptual and physical movement becomes equal, experience becomes a language, and concreteness emerges from the highly abstract, metaphysical nature of Ratnadeep Adivrekar’s work. It is this concreteness of individual experience, the original impetus for the story –

“I remember you from tomorrow.”

 

Abhijeet Gondkar

(Abhijeet Gondkar is an independent writer and curator based in Mumbai. The above excerpts are from Ratnadeep Adivrekar’s solo show “I remember you from tomorrow.” at IFBE Space, Mumbai in November 2022)