1980 jangaon, Telangana
MFA - Painting, Hyderabad Central University.Hyderabad.
BFA - Painting, MMK College of Visual Art, Gulbarga.
Swinging back and forth Masuram Ravikanth, a promising artist, re-discovers his Spandolika, a play toy from his childhood, while searching for an innovative visual vocabulary. (The Sanskrit word spandolika means ‘rocking one’s self to and fro’). The artist’s enthralling artworks may be termed as his nostalgic renditions of bygone days but, why does this straightforward imagery recur in his paintings? Probably the artist has a number of possible answers. One such idea of Masuram is that these ‘play-toys’ are not mere re-presentations of the bygone era but a deliberate effort to re-contextualize the ‘spandolika’ itself.
The present series of paintings mounted in the show seems to be largely based on the horse, the best of all beasts, depicted in various artistic traditions such as in Channapatna, which perhaps inspired him apart from the comic books and the archives of the studio photography which he witnessed at his father’s photo studio as he grew up. Thus, his canvases appear like the hand-painted props that were used in old school photo studios to serve as illusionary sceneries in two-dimension within the space, at times, they are an amalgamation of both appropriations of popular pictures and Indian miniature.
Masuram consciously picks up possible variants of a horse and juxtaposes them along with contemporary imagery like ‘James Bond’ or ‘Superman’ creating witty sarcasm and comments on the kitschy nature of (post)modernity. Further, he marks the very comment employing a gaudy palette with intricate ornamentation. This sort of nostalgia, for matured Masuram, is an intuitive emotion that he painstakingly tries to bring forth in his marvelous renderings.