“A phosphorescent jewel gives off its glow and colour in the dark and loses its beauty in the light of day. Were it not for shadows, there would be no beauty.” - Jun’ichiro Tanizaki

With their meticulously worked-over surfaces, every detail picked out and every contour delineated, many of Pandurang Deoghare’s works look, on a first encounter, like topographical models. As we look at them, we feel we are viewing cities from the air, seeing them far below us, mapped out in blocks and ridges that indicate built form and flatter areas that suggest mud-flats or shallow lakes. Deoghare’s chromatics are subtle and muted, their force held in reserve: his works are animated by chalky browns, off-whites of various intensities, dusty blues and yellows, and the occasional orange stripe. The artist carries on a continuous argument with the grid, that master talisman of the Modern, which promises order, discipline, and stability. He picks at it, multiplies and rotates it, visits transection and annotation upon it, and extends its possibilities through permutation and combination. He refuses to worship it, and by extension, declines to serve the disciplinary austerity for which it stands. He celebrates departures into diversity instead. Deoghare approaches his art with an architect’s sensitivity towards the moods of shapes that have been extended into space, to embark on varied adventures in dimensionality. He brings to his art, as well, a printmaker’s dexterity and subtle knowledge of the differing temperaments of surfaces that have been marked, incised or layered in various ways. Vitally, his mixed-media works are ambidextrous, equally nimble and at home in three domains. They are paintings in the sense that they are often built up in layers of paint. But they are also sculptural objects, since Deoghare uses a variety of elements including marbles, recycled materials, as well as embossed papers, to articulate his compositions. In some of his recent works, celebrating his versatility of technique, he has also used etching, engraving and textural play on composite marble and ceramic surfaces. A number of his works are embossed with zinc plates, at high pressure, which accounts for their subtle low-relief character. And, in the manner in which they develop from the adjacencies of dissimilar materials, they partake of the energetic spirit of collage. Indeed, Deoghare’s commitment to the principle of what he terms ‘structural collage’ is strong and generative. Some of his works are formed from the dynamics of pleat and crimp, a sequence of slopes that spell out a visual rhyme, or a shutter-glide of triangles. The artist’s working process embraces not only human-made materials, but also such unasked gifts of nature as light and shadow. Let us recall what the Japanese novelist and essayist Jun’ichiro Tanizaki observes in the epigraph to this text, “Were it not for shadows, there would be no beauty.” Some of the angles and variable outlines of the elements of Deoghare’s works catch the light; some of them are shielded from it or absorb it. Their interplay incarnates the dialogue between the visible and the eclipsed, the palpable and the withdrawn. This dialogue evolves into a trope for his work at large: the emphasis and the hint, that which is manifested and that which lies hidden, enter into a lively correspondence in his mixed-media works.

1. Jun’ichiro Tanizaki, In Praise of Shadows (Thomas J. Harper and Edward G. Seidensticker trans. Stony Creek CT: Leete’s Island Books, 1977), p. 30. 

Ranjit Hoskhote