From Sensations to Consciousness!

Mumbai based artist Ashok Hinge’s latest show ‘Matrix of Consciousness’ is currently on at Jehangir Art Gallery. This article provides an insightful view on the inspiring progression made by the artist since his previous show ‘Incantation of Sensations’ in 2019.  

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For a visual artist, every visual experience counts and it gets deposited in their mind’s repository as food for their unstoppable visual rumination process. This continuous process devours all externally sourced visual experiences and uses them as an input for an internally driven process of creating new visual experiences in the form of expressive paintings.

For some artists, over a period, this rumination process graduates towards a deeper contemplative phase, wherein the artist attempts to fathom the unknown, using the visual experiences of the known. That is when the process of painting leans inwards, to explore the inner consciousness before it is finally full blown to connect with the universal consciousness.

Ashok Hinge’s latest exhibition at the Jehangir Art Gallery, titled ‘Matrix of Consciousness’ offers viewers a glimpse of this process which he seems to have gone through over the past several years. Ashok Namdeo Hinge, a seasoned Mumbai based painter, is a graduate in Fine Art from Govt School of Art Aurangabad passed in 2000. He has several awards to his credit including four awards from the Art Society of India and also Prafulla Dahanukar Merit Certificate Award. He has had 8 solo shows and has participated in over 50 group shows so far.

After completing two decades of professional career, he took an admirable step of going back to college wherein he completed a Masters in Fine Art by Research, from Dr Babasaheb Ambedkar Marathwada University, Aurangabad in 2023.

While taking a stock of Ashok’s current exhibition, artist and visual thinker Hansodnya Tambe mentions in his note that a visual matrix is a hypercomplex visual experience that is akin to visual experiences of everyday life. In Ashok Hinge’s paintings, he has put forth such visual experiences in the form of a visual language created in a visual space. These paintings offer several actions such as magnification, rotation, reflection and projection as unique visual experiences.

I have a vivid recollection of having met artist Ashok Hinge for the first time in 2019 during his previous show at Jehangir. It was titled ‘Incantation of Sensations’ which was an extension of his early experiments with black ink, titled ‘Living lines’.

In hindsight, now it seems to me that ‘Incantation of Sensations’ was his first step of carefully collecting the visual sensations and immaculately taking note of their two dimensional structures. Over the past four years since then, he seems to have gone further and deeper, by exploration of those incantations, following them deeply towards their roots, finding their structure and nature in three dimensions while making them his instruments of exploring the consciousness itself. This journey is not only interesting, but is also exciting and leaves the viewers in much anticipation for his works in the future.

Another refreshing change in this exhibition as compared to his previous one is that he has presented many large sized canvases of 72X48 and a grand 42X114 that is a real show-stopper. Further, Ashok’s interesting experiments with the palette and multi-layer technique have created many enjoyable and satisfying visual experiences.

Me being a lifelong student of science, Ashok’s paintings quickly remind me of some similar looking science visuals. Those are, the astronomical events such as the Big bang leading to creation of matter from energy, or a mysterious black hole at the centre of a galaxy constantly sucking everything in, or a DNA replicating inside a cell, or some man-made events such as high speed collisions of atoms, in a LHC (Large Hadron Collider).

While Ashok patiently welcomes such visual comparisons, he clarifies that everyone is free to experience and interpret his paintings as they perceive them, even though many of such visual similarities may not resonate with what he had in mind while painting. Indeed, this is the quality of such paintings that gives them a universal appeal.

As Ashok puts it lucidly, what is most important while painting is the state of mind that the artist has to achieve while painting, in which there is a delicate balance between planning and spontaneity, conscious action and being a witness as well as between controlling and letting go! Once this is achieved, the outcome is a unique visual experience.

For having these unique visual experiences first hand, art lovers have to visit this exhibition at Jehangir Art Gallery. It is open for visitors till Monday, 8^th January between 11 am to 7 pm.

Vineel Bhurke