A warm shifting checkerboard-like interplay of dark sienna and indigo versus corals, pinks and reds balance a single chartreuse square at the bottom left. Prashant Salvi’s intriguing integration of oil and other types of particles with pigment add texture to his layered applications of color and slow down the reading of his work. The presence of the series recedes slightly from its conceptual companion due to its paler shades and thinned applications of paint. Another vertical composition, its right hand column of squares is cropped. There are sets of smaller squares faintly visible with the atmospheric blocks of grey green and rust. The piece is punctuated by a dark, glittering square flanked by a small flat red box abutting the right edge of the painting. I have found my center. He creates rich, sensual, colorful, intensely felt, and jarringly material paintings. With sumptuous colors and richly encrusted Salvi seeks to bring from the gathered quiddities that stew of unnamable visual and emotional qualities of the world a visual situation intended to generate both intense engagement and quiet contemplation in the viewer.
Left Artist Prashant Salvi and Abhijeet Gondkar in Nippon gallery-Mumbai
Taking a step into Prashant
Salvi’s space, I realize the works as a whole invite a natural sifting through
and pleasurable classification of his pictorial modes. This parallels his
creative process. The artist presently exercises capabilities that engage a
density of formative parameters. There is the intensity of attention; there is
the tolerance for the confounding as well as the compounding of that which is
discernible; there is the alertness to attraction, which drives the sorting and
apprizing through the oceanic character of phenomenology. What Not to Wear on a Horse includes
an array of other works revealing the range of Salvi’s phenomenological
investigations. The series exemplifies the dense, over-all gestural painted
lines he had long used for their arousal of kinetic sensation. Some result from
his long held fascination with archetypal, insistent geometric configurations,
which appear and disappear as they are framed and formed in his irregular
shifting fields. What Not to Wear on a Horse refers to particulars in
the visual and emotional world which catch the artist’s eye and stir his mind,
and from which he draws substance for his imaginative proposals. Among these
bits and pieces of the real world, interactions occur and compel decisions of
color, form, and surface to go in unexpected directions. Aspects of artifacts make
their appearance in his paintings repeatedly. Salvi seizes upon the essential
visual properties he sees in these objects which, when filtered through his
ever churning mind, become archetypes to be used and adapted endlessly, items
in his ever evolving creative vocabulary. While Salvi’s work is grounded by an
empirical approach to the quiddities of this world, it attains transcendence by
providing the viewer with the contemplative space in which to engage with
mysterious new worlds. The works embrace the persistent yet fleeting nature of
time and examines this force as a unifying factor of human existence.
The artist draws inspiration from
a variety of art forms, to create complex, highly imaginative works that fuse
distinct cultural references and modes of artistic representation in What Not to Wear on a Horse. While the
artist find inspiration in numerous sources, his distinct visual language is
always charged with personal significance, incorporating his fantasy universe,
for example, recall the yellow-tinged light that permeated the artists’
childhood home, while his vast array of signs and symbols are often drawn from
his own dreams. Throughout this new body of work the artist gives space
and form to his vivid inner world, and the works collapse distinctions between
body, architecture, fantasy and sacred geometry, to create a universe where the
self fantastically converges with the wider world. An airplane emerges to greet
the bird on the window sill. Defying conventions of perspectival space, Salvi’s
works complicate notions of figure and ground; in The Bird Song the
central figure depicts a fantastical landscape, as if another universe is
springing forth from the subject’s head. The work’s striped; brightly-colored
background recalls the geometric compositions on the vibrant surfaces. Across
Salvi’s patterned surface, the central figure’s limbs cast long shadows, and
the artists’ geometric worlds reveal traces of their inhabitants at every turn,
blending painting practices to thwart distinctions between interiority and
exteriority, figure and ground, and self and world. Representing their
dreamlike universe, Prashant Salvi considers space an expansive term that
simultaneously encompasses both the public sphere and inner fantasy.
For Salvi, these works explore
psychological conditions, manifested in the physiology of the human form.
What Not to Wear on a Horse represents the synthesis of opposing forces,
physical and emotional, traditional and unexpected. The series challenges our
accepted impressions of the world around us. For this series, the artist
contorts with images that evoke anthropomorphic physical qualities and
movement. Pulling the reference from his daily life and childhood, Salvi
re-envisions in unexpected contexts to challenge our perceptions of the objects
in reality. True to Salvi’s practice, these works are both familiar yet
strange and evoke pause and contemplation from the viewer.
Gallery Timings: 3 PM – 7 PM
Nippon GalleryAbhijeet Gondkar
August 2026, Mumbai
