The idea of the place in today’s time is the most delusional concept to approach in understanding the branches of social sciences, city planning, and artistic practices. The concept of place in contemporary times cannot be ignored through its physicality, psychological configurations of spaces, and their metaphysical values in defining what they mean to both geographical and cultural contexts. Various attributions of places, in general, it is central to how one comprehends through the (in)abilities to remember and recognize what constitutes what a place is. In the times we are living in, there are places that disappear at times like a cloud of smoke and at times alter like a glitch and at times camouflage in a manner in which they exist yet disappear or be invisible from the consciousness of seeing for locating their existence. It is fascinating to question what are the languages through which we navigate such non-places, which are often ignored and perhaps unseen through the production of knowledge as a contrast to what is visible. Such spaces are often questioned in a way if they exist, how one refers to such voids and emptiness in articulating their ontological existence. This debut solo exhibition, Magic Erase, by Hemant Gavankar- the awardee of Art Centrix Painting Grant 2024, is an attempt to engage with his practice, while highlighting the subject matters, thematics and conceptual choices through the artist’s journey shaped over the years in realizing this exhibition. One of the central inquiries in his practice is to enable meanings in the constitution of the places and spaces shaped through his personal experiences and his surrounding landscapes. As an artist, Hemant’s practice is rooted in unfolding the apparatus of change, while searching for a painterly language that provides geographical, historical, socio-cultural, personal, and digital paradigms in the process of his picture-making practice.

Similarly, the practice of Gavankar is also shaped through working with the images and the way we have been witnessing the multiplicity of images in our everyday lives. Such spaces in the artist’s practice are to understand a sense of erasing and a search for the loss in the reproductions of the representations. The idea of working with multiple spaces and referencing the narrativity of different stenches of time and spaces in a singular plane is about the multiplicity of the images that this present has offered from the augmented and the real world of our times. Starting from dividing spaces in his picture-making practice to artistically engaging with the images as the images (found, sourced, and experienced), his concerns are to connect with the absurdities of reality shaping the new forms of imagination in the process of meaning-making.  Through this exhibition- Magic Erase, the focus is to engage with Hemant’s magic realist approach in his picture-making practice to tell the stories of displacement, personal-ancestral loss and a critique of the immortal altered present in contrast to the various personal histories and longing for domesticities.  

– Sibdas Sengupta