Unruly Syntax Show - Essay

- By, Lina Vincent Sunish

Collage of Skins

Ravi Kashi’s work process and methodologies inspire one to picture him in the garb of an artist-archaeologist: he metaphorically digs through layers, deciphering contexts; he persistently builds anthropological relationships with material culture as his guide; and refers to language and lexicons of meaning as a tool to map everyday culture. The City, in all its beauty and ugliness, its plainness and complexity, is his site of research. It is an entity in constant flux, shifting its skins and morphing its inhabitants - it is a site that has yielded many stories to him, and continues to be his playground for experimentation.

‘The Unruly Syntax’ showcases a body of work that re-grounded him in the act of painting, which had been left at the margins of his practice over the last decade and returned strongly during the isolated period of the pandemic.

Kashi has created an evolving archive of visual culture over the years, comprising photographs of hoardings in different states of usage, hand painted illustrations on shops, identity markers on vehicles, torn posters, fragments of advertisements, political and religious banners, film cut-outs, match box covers, public-service announcements, graffiti art …and the list is vast. The images are supported and extended by an equally vast compilation of objects and memorabilia from popular culture and street aesthetics. During the pandemic, Kashi enlarged his archive by further investigating and documenting the area within a 4–5-kilometre radius around his home. All this formed the foundation for the series of paintings; a hybrid collage of ideas and impressions that communicate a multi-layered experience of Bangalore City.

For Kashi, a driving factor is his deep interest in the social history of place, and its constant evolution. Interaction with traces of the past and a metamorphosing present, through the medium of architectural surfaces and material residues, provides him with subtle entry points into the underlying narratives of city life. The works are filled with visual and textual clues, with sometimes tongue-in-cheek remarks, puns and witty mixes of bilingual terms – covering a considerable variety of subject matter pertaining to human existence within a social structure. Connotations of religion, politics, feminism, gender disparity, social hierarchies, local myths, nationalism and popular cultural beliefs, all appear and disappear in a stream of visually-articulated discourse. The imagery touches upon the diverse anxieties and aspirations birthed in a modern urban space. Kashi employs the cues and images as symbols for deeper and often hard-hitting commentaries on contemporary times; the paintings abound with innuendos and implications that may not be apparent at first glance. Each image and word is a marker that carries its own (personal, collective, regional, national, or global) baggage and history. In conscious permutations and combinations, they can be read differently, and their meanings alter according to context as well as the viewer’s conditioning.

The audience is an important link in the cycles of meaning generated by Kashi’s paintings. It brings to mind the theory of Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889 – 1951)

“The meaning of a word, or a set of words, is the kind of employment of it.”

Wittgenstein’s philosophy brings ethnography into the discussion, by giving importance to the colloquial and the common ways of communication, and establishing the logic that the limits of a word are set by social convention. He once said that a ‘serious and good philosophical work could be written consisting entirely of jokes’. In the context of Kashi’s paintings, it seems possible to apply the same to the language of symbols and cultural markers too. The multiplicity of meanings could arise out of the abundance of shifts in social conventions, according to region, religion, cultural heritage, place and identity, among other markers.

Thus, the symbolic visual vocabulary in Kashi’s paintings represent a host of narratives, an abundance of subtexts, and an active engagement with paradox. The signs act as triggers for heterogenous ideas and interpretations, at times deliberately skirting publicly sensitive subjects or controversy. With subtle irony, Kashi highlights the contrasts and extremes of our current times. Each picture plane becomes a radical space for negotiating the complexities of socio-cultural, political, economic, ecological and spiritual layers of urban living.

It connects profoundly to his personal experience of identity, and relationship with place. His memories, notions of loss and erasure, personal anxieties and challenges, and ideas of censorship are entangled within the broader narrative. He is at once, an observer and a participant.

Formally speaking, the grid like structure of the paintings, and the revisiting of old canvases, mimics the process of what happens with a billboard. A billboard has its own history, with layers of content added and removed over the years, in some places generating a composite of fragments. Kashi has always used revelation and concealment as devices; here he employs configurations of intricate figuration and abstraction, balancing busy sections with flat colouration and graphic minimalism. Images are tilted, and upturned - turned this way and that in what looks like a random arrangement – but one that is actually a result of lengthy processes of artistic and aesthetic fine-tuning. As with earlier work, sections are inspired by a reference to pixels and grid-lines, both computer generated as well as related to systems of mechanical reproduction. Additionally, Kashi enlivens the surface with simulations of textures, like the very scratches, flaking paint, and tattered edges of the various surfaces he documents in reality.

Ravi Kashi’s art-making process reflects a continual translation of ideas from the archive, to the journal, to a specific surface or framework. His visual language often moves back and forth between symbols that recur over years of his practice, imbued with similar or different meanings as the context dictates. His ideas are catalysed within the space; he draws the viewer through an experiential engagement with Bangalore city through the strategic use of text and image.

‘The Unruly Syntax’ allows for a slow unravelling of concepts and secrets that the paintings offer. As with all of Kashi’s works, they bring with them a multiplicity of tangible and intangible experiences, and an open window into altered worlds.

Each time a skin is shed, a new one takes its place.

Lina Vincent, 2021