Asymmetrical Synthesis: Prabhakar Kolte

The exhibition Asymmetrical Synthesis presents recent works by Prabhakar Kolte, along with writings, poems, lectures and videos as archival notes that impress upon the spontaneity and conviction of his creative awareness. The artist’s voice percolates with the reading of Dnyaneshwari alongside his lecture-conversations with students. We thus enter the anterior chamber of Kolte’s mind, and amidst the intermingling of sound, one sees the drips of paint: binding, building, erasing, filling, forming, --- each canvas mirroring an active multiplicity of perceptive gestures, formless amoeba that births creation, and the search of what preceded before.

Here, the ensemble reverses the order of the conductor, where each musician plays to his own accord, breaking convention, following the creative impulse of that moment and letting the play of chance, rhythm and movement precede. In Asymmetrical Synthesis, Kolte offers an array of sounds, movements and actions: interspersed, intermixed and improvised as a soliloquy of multiple selves within a singular consciousness. Drawing from Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, the concept of “asymmetrical synthesis” allows for the coexistence of contradictory elements without an apparent balance, harmony and unity. Instead “asymmetrical synthesis” affirms the possibility of divergent elements to exist in a dynamic, unequal flux, making room for the unknown to subsist alongside the known, both independent of the other.

For Prabhakar Kolte, “painting is a continuous process,” one that continues irrespective of whether one is actively painting or not, and to remain in the constancy of this creative-internal assimilation is more vital than the act of painting itself. Effacing the conventional interpretations of narrative, figurative, symbolic or abstract expressions, he defines his practice as a method of “following nature” in its processual, unceasing and erratic formation. He believes that painting is an act in the present versus a reaction, repetition, resemblance or reflection of existing ideas. Synthesizing the seen and unseen, Kolte unveils the anomalies and asymmetries as gestures of colour.