Current Exhibition

Bikaner House, At Living Traditions Centre LTC,

Shah Jahan Road, New Delhi, 110003.

‘Unspeakable Miracle’, a title derived from Walt Whitman is an entry point as well as an attempt to ‘meaning’ of the works presented in this exhibition. Meaning, is a word that Prabhakar Kolte sees as a problematic in itself.  ‘Unspeakable Miracle’ offers an invitation to experience the miracle of making or the miracle of the made. It is not necessary that the experiential values of Kolte’s works should be homogenous or curatorial-ly directed. Miracles are poetic experiences that are similar to the spiritual experiences that pose linguistic mediation next to impossible or ineffectual. Kolte’s works, going by the Bacon-ian fashion, are to be looked at, contemplated and experienced. Any effort to generate a narrative around them would end up in mere verbosity, which curators are prone to at any given context.

Kolte approaches the painterly surfaces as a miraculous space, capable of revealing more than one expects. It is like entering into a pod of bright white light where one is forced to stop the flood of radiance with the shades of palms. Kolte’s sole effort in these works seems to be creating a layer that manages the flow of light from within. The larger portions of the canvases are covered with dark and opaque colors, leaving certain areas uncovered letting the internal radiance spill out. The paintings of Kolte in this sense become the ‘removal’ of the given and ‘retrieval’ of the found. The employment of broad strokes of blues, greens, reds and tinges of ochre in such works offer possibilities of expanding the interiority of visual experiences that could turn into an inexplicable sensation of understanding and pleasure.