Most Political critiques of the dominant order rely heavily on caricatures. This was my first reaction to Savi Sawarkar’s works which I saw as images projected on the walls at a conference on Art and Activism held in the department of Art History in Baroda in 2002. The question that I had asked the paper presenter, Y S Alone, was why did the artist need to confront one set of which portrays the dalit as equally typecast into as a brutalized entity. Now in retrospect, standing in front of Savi’s works, the question raised by me seemed naïve. It is premised on an assumption that caricatures deliberately distort the real to dramatize the social injustice, to make visible the diabolical workings of power and to pluck out the mask of folly to reveal the truth underneath. Savi portrays the victim as stereotypically as the oppressor. One is the figure while the other becomes the ground and their interchangeability as interlocking shapes spell out centuries of mutual dependency of the exploiter and the exploited. He derives his language of protest from a poetics of a critique of conventional language. At times he wields his brush like a weapon and at times caresses the surface with a delicacy of a sensual touch. His style of painting unfolds between these two extremes of draughtsman ship. From almost treating the canvas as a wall where paint marks seem scribbled, scratched and scattered in a graffiti mode to touching the surface delicately to evoke sensuality of the body, Savi defies being categorized as a political painter whose central agenda deals with caste alone. His paintings traverse ambivalently between politics and poetics -the politics of exposure of caste dynamics in contemporary India and poetics -the politics of exposure of caste dynamics in contemporary India and poetics of line, of form and of color.
There are no reviews yet.