Makarand
Rane’s paintings feature repeated botanical forms that organize color in
various hues and traces. His imagery is influenced by Matisse's cut-outs and
Ellsworth Kelly's drawings of plants, as well as direct observation of fallen
leaves and flowers. The works reveal a close examination of the process of
painting as an act of depicting and covering and connect the painted image with
the flatness of printing and the dimensionality of sculpture. Born in Kankavli,
Sindhudurg he studied art at Sahyadri School of Art, Sawarde, Chiplun. Inspiring
Makarand to explore Konkan’s corollary in the
visual arts, where landscape is culture. The works disrupt usual ways of
looking at iconic works while interrogating the ways that visual depictions of
place tell us much about cultural and historic attitudes towards the
natural world and our environment.
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| Artist: Makarand Rane |
At
the entrance to the visual center of the gallery and in some ways the entire
show, is a magnificent yellow painting, which unfolds across a gold leaf
screens. Here, the painting follows the folds of the panels making use of their
movement to reveal a landscape of mountains and water. A narrative unfolds and
at its dramatic conclusion, the scholar who has arrived by boat to contemplate
the scene makes his appearance, serene under a massive rock formation. The
effect is operatic, the brushwork that has come before at times as gently black
as mist, at other times a staccato flurry builds to a crescendo here in
the swirling black strokes of the rock formation.
The
physicality of the brushwork is what commands attention; the painter appears to
have been moving his ink-laden brush like a fevered conductor. And yet, the
scene is one of contemplation, of absolute stillness. How can this be? These
visual paradoxes, and the rhythms of the making evident in the masterful
brushwork, create the compelling imagery, the rocks themselves depicted in
urgent of dark strokes. So begins this small gem of an exhibition, featuring 10
carefully chosen works which from the onset, challenges viewers to re- think
the pictorial representation of landscape and nature in Konkan while offering
an opportunity to view masterpieces on canvas.“My idea was to put together a
show of landscape painting,” says the artist, “without using the word
‘landscape’. I wanted to expand popular ideas of ink brush painting to help
people see beyond the usual expectations of what art from Konkan should be.”
The division of the show into three main themes: imagined places, mountains,
trees, fields are sacred to the artist.
The
emphasis is upon the possibilities of brushwork and the resulting tonality in
the handling of black ink on paper, alongside colors on canvas. What
constitutes “landscape” is also radically different from Western painting
traditions. Japanese pictorial vision relied on invented scenes, literally
called sansui, “mountains and water,” or as in the case of the yellow
leaf, as imagined in peak Konkan summer. Nature as a subject of contemplation
is not something apart from man, but rather, man is as much a part of nature as
the mountains and water. Even the language of comparison becomes tricky.
The term “landscape,” (which derives from the German word landschaft,
denoting agriculture), not apply to Japanese ink painting, but neither does the
word nature, which does not even exist in the Japanese language. The closest
Japanese word, “shizen,” which only entered the language in the 19th Century
through translations of Western texts which used the word nature, is used
primarily as an adjective meaning to act naturally, or in keeping with one’s
essential nature. Naming is of course a critical act of separation of self from
the object being named.
In
religion and philosophy, the concept of man versus nature has been an enduring
theme, depicting
an artist setting to work on a painting of an outdoor scene, beginning with a
mountain, but soon details make it clear that this artist is seated inside and
the mountain he paints is from his imagination. Makarand’s piece, in romantic
vision of nature has been burned, perforated and rendered unstable, bits of it
piled on the floor in what amounts to a stark critique of the idea of nature as
something pristine, apart and thus enduring. We are reminded that visions of
landscape reflect culture, history, and in very direct ways, the subject
position of the viewer. Just as refreshing, the stance of eco-critical
art history, which extends beyond questions of representation to consider the
environmental implications of materials, is introduced. We engage the
ways art has always embodied ecological conditions both materially and
conceptually whether the maker recognizes them or not.
The title of the exhibition, “Stratographs” pays
homage to the new republic’s urgent sense of exceptionalism, based in the idea that
a place apart, a previously un-peopled and unspoiled wilderness where history
could begin again a new Eden. As the exhibition reveals, Konkan’s
wilderness as the ethical, spiritual and aesthetic birthright went hand in hand
with a ruthlessly extractive view of nature as raw material to be used for
progress., rendered with a quality of light that evokes beauty, truth and
inspiration; we feast on a romantic vision of nature as all-powerful and beyond
the reach of human ken. But as our eye travels the lines of cliffs and down
through trees and rock formations, something interesting happens, the formal
elements of composition begin to tame this wilderness. Symmetric and asymmetric
forms are balanced by areas of intense light and dark, creating rhythms of
looking, encouraging the eye through this painted landscape in an orderly and
logical progression. We are not crashing through the underbrush, scratching
ourselves on thorny vines and poison oak. Magnificent wilderness is rendered
safe as a postcard, while the sloping cliffs and falls intensify the sense of
space and openness. The visual logic of the painting not only supports the
exceptionalism of the costal nature; it renders this wilderness critically
spacious and empty, ready for settlement.
Environmental humanities is a relatively new and
evolving field, but this show, the result of years of work by Makarand,
demonstrates the ways in which the eco-critical lens is both timely and moving.
His indirect and painstaking process creates spirit-filled visions, where the
experience of perspective and rational space is blurred into fragments and
projections. They are like elegiac shrines to the natural world and to the
impossibility of separating human presence from the landscape, which is as much
a product of the mind as the weather. Strata of cultural and personal memory
accumulate in dense deposits like layers of compressed rock: his paintings are
as much geological as psychological.
Abhijeet
Gondkar
March 2026
Phansop,
Ratnagiri
