Solo exhibition by Ratnadeep Gopal Adivrekar
A space of speculative thinking that transcends physical boundaries through imaginative exploration, ‘I remember you from tomorrow,’ is an amalgam of transitioning, fragmented realities. In the socio-politically charged yet fragmented society, saturated with an opulence of images signifying radical modernist utopias, Ratnadeep assumes the role of an archivist. Deconstructing and reinterpreting visuals, he pieces them within the realms of his personal experiences, which then reveal connections between philosophy, selfhood, world and time.
Time, central to his practice, is approached not as a linear progression but as a cyclical and layered phenomenon that shapes memory and identity. Drawing on the Atharva Veda, he invokes the concept of time as Aswa—a timeless continuity without past or future; exploring how our perception of time shapes our understanding of events, wherein proximity sharpens clarity, while distance invites reinterpretation. Bridging historical and future timelines, the artworks enable reflection as a vessel for memory, creating a tangible manifestation of intangible experiences.
Here, we see snapshots of his movement through time, combining historical references with objects, interiors, stories, and people that define his life. Translating the three-dimensional world into colour and line, his paintings confound expectations of scale and vantage point, creating moments of conjecture and contemplation. His bricolage approach involves splicing photographic fragments from his life, vintage magazines, and art history into his canvases. These elements are then transformed through processes that oscillate between abstraction and representation.
‘I remember you from tomorrow,’ posits itself within the meta-modern framework, where Ratnadeep assumes the role of the creator and summoner, bringing together images and objects into the material, and here, the viewer dawns the role of the participant and interpreter. The meta-narratives embedded in his works—conceptual models that organise knowledge and experience—function as avatars of creativity, traversing time and space. Finding inspiration across diverse sources, from ancient Hindu mythology, such as Vishnu (preserver of time), to more contemporary acts like John Cage’s experimental ‘Prepared Piano’ and George Brecht’s ‘Drip Music,’ Ratnadeep seamlessly blends literary and art-historical influences, forming an interconnected web of memory, perception, and emotion. His works and methodology merge abstraction and figuration through a richly coloured, illustrative style. Vibrant, discordant palettes and off-kilter compositions evoke emotional intensity and complexity, while the balance between chaos and order reflects a dynamic tension. His art re-imagines traditional painting methods, offering layered narratives and diverse approaches to contemporary storytelling. Ratnadeep’s skepticism toward grand narratives emerges in his refusal to offer singular interpretations, reflecting the fluidity and multiplicity of meaning, embracing disorientation and uncertainty. This fragmented approach mirrors the postmodern condition, highlighting the ephemeral and interconnected nature of the world. By weaving together history, mythology, and personal memory, Ratnadeep Adivrekar’s ‘I remember you from tomorrow’ re-imagines the act of storytelling, creating a space for reflection on time, identity, and the richness of narrative in contemporary art.
Ratnadeep begins by noting the deliberate paradox of his title, the central thesis that the continuity of time and each moment contains all eternity. The title, he notes, is his way of illustrating that our language is so saturated and animated by time. With his characteristic self-effacing paintings Ratnadeep cautions that they might be the artifice of a viewer lost in the maze of metaphysics and then he proceeds to deliver a masterwork of rhetoric and reason, carried on the wings of uncommon poetic beauty illustrating Octavio Paz’s Sunstone an epic poem concerned with a complete change in appearance or form. The work is emphasis on spontaneous, automatic and subconscious.
In painting the sextant Ratnadeep ends by returning to the beginning, to the raw material of his title and arguably, of his entire body of work, of his very self: paradox. He paints temporal succession, the self, the astronomical universe, and apparent desperations and secret consolations. Our destiny is not frightful by being unreal; it is frightful because it is irreversible and iron-clad. Time is the substance we are made of. The image is from performance Ikiru by Tadashi Endo – Hommage Á Pina Bausch (“Ikiru,” meaning “to live” in Japanese) but it is manipulated by repetition to look like the norns. The Norns were the Norse goddesses of fate, represented as three sisters. They lived underneath the world tree, where they wove the tapestry of fate. Here they are holding continuous a rope loop.
Through George Brecht’s ‘Drip Music,’ of performance art, collecting paint sounds in a bucket Ratnadeep unleashes it onto his canvas reliving the moment of sound and the act. The work is resolution between choice and chance. The first performer on a tall ladder pours water from a pitcher very slowly down into the bell of a French horn or tuba held in the playing position by a second performer at floor level. So looking at documentation photographed. It doesn’t represent but rather presents and the idea of time present in the photograph. In connection with art, and the affective image, we shall indicate two aspects of chance, one where the origin of images is unknown because it lies in deeper than conscious levels of the mind, and the second where images derive from mechanical processes not under the artist’s control. On the top is Sphinx drawing borrowed from the first edition of book cover of The Time Machine by H.G.Wells. The presence of Sphinx suggests that there must be puzzle which the time traveler should solve.
Space and time are not drawn from experience but are presupposed in experience. They are never observed as such, but they constitute that context within which all events observed. They cannot be known to exist in nature independently of the mind, but the world cannot be known by the mind without them. Space and time therefore cannot be said to be characteristic of the world in itself, for they are contributed in the act of human observation. The 3 hands denote seeing time in past, present and future but the watches don’t have hands, while the red lines represent branching out possibilities through fractured time. The word for ‘occur’ in German is GESCHIEHT (Present tense)- GESCHAH (Past tense) – ISTGESCHEMEN (Present Perfect tense) – GESCHEN (infinitive tense)…fourth one for infinitive. What is the relationship between word and picture? For if the word is to be of duration, it must be linked to script, which in turn derives from the linear possibilities of drawing, while being itself a sign. When exactly does a drawing become a sign? And what about its ambivalence? To what extent does the legibility of signs depend on cultural consensus bound up with a time and space? Through the flow of occurrence subjective experiences Ratnadeep perceives an external reality of himself demarcated from it.
Making his way through the maze of philosophy, Ratnadeep maps what he calls the world of the mind in relation to time. He illustrates this paradox of the present moment by painting moment familiar from literature, art history, music, myth and architecture. This simultaneity of all events has immense implications as a sort of humanitarian manifesto for the commonness of human experience, which Ratnadeep captures beautifully in his paintings.
Abhijeet Gondkar
(Abhijeet Gondkar is an independent writer and curator based in Mumbai. The above excerpts are from Ratnadeep Adivrekar’s solo show “I remember you from tomorrow.”
Solo exhibition by Ratnadeep Gopal Adivrekar
3 – 28 February 2025
Dhoomimal Art Centre, Delhi
