Yashwant Deshmukh’s paintings revolve around an intriguing interplay of forms.

The artist has been a keen practitioner of minimalism. He looks to establish a definite relationship between form and the space around, and present the viewers with a unique visual experience.

He inserts objects of daily use such as a bucket or a funnel in his canvasses that are totally devoid of human figure. They are a series of still images or studies of everyday objects that force a kind of intense reflection upon these objects, making them stand out and gather a life of their own.

Yashwant Deshmukh’s objects are like ‘individual protagonists’ that are to be viewed strictly in relation with the space in which they levitate. Their contours are stark and solid; inevitably contrasted by cold, geometrical compositions in dull, muted colors. They assert the primacy of the material in all its stubborn solidity.

The objects are manmade or ‘handled’, albeit their solitary existence and precision is in sharp contrast to the chaotic disorder and flux of the human beings that often looks to impose order upon the material world. In Yashwant Deshmukh’s creations, the form and content merge so pertinently that it is not possible to separate them.

At a broader level, the artist investigates the metaphysics of space and form. Space within, around and in between the forms creates a magnetic tension and a spectrum of form emerges. Elaborating on his treatment of forms and interrelating to the space on the canvas, the artist notes: “The elements like volume, movement, shade and light are mostly minimal in my work. A viewer won’t experience any play of shade and light or a sense of movement. Mostly, the form is vertical or horizontal – very static.”

The objects represent the painter’s psyche and the nature of representing them reflects the anonymity of his present environment, his space. The contoured edges of their shapes often weigh the entire content of the painting.

Each line, curve, angle and surface is to be viewed in its entirety. There is a strange sense of structural build-up of these very same lines, curves and angles, so that each time a new perspective is seen, and each painting is posited as an emblem of that perspective.

Yashwant Deshmukh’s forms create invisible planes. The interaction of these planes with the negative space surrounding them serves as an artistic trigger to the artist. Commenting on his ‘play’ with liquid space on the canvas, the artist says: “Our knowledge about liquid state is its transparency. It’s a quality of changing its volume according to the form. Because of the angle of refraction the object underneath changes its dimensions.”

It’s evident that the optical nature of these images is derived from an intense artistic introspection. Drawing to him serves as a method of defining space only by adding a minimal element. The emptiness gradually gets converted into space and gets defined with the addition of contour line and sometimes smudging of tones.

The process of painting further determines the validity of its existence when the area gets covered part by part through translucent and opaque coats of paints. Here, the element of color plays a passive role. color sometimes represents ‘colorlessness’ as a medium of spatial entity.

In certain images, the color itself serves almost a negative area in the painting whereas its basic function is to describe an outline and state the nature of the form. colors help to define the tones and intensity of space (the artist prefers acrylics.) The artist avoids ‘fresh’ colors since he often looks to depict the lack of movement, or the deadness, the stillness of space.

The artist’s exploration of space is not merely in the physical sense. It is the ‘space’, which cannot be seen by the eyes, but only appeal through one’s perception. It’s a mystic space of our unconscious; the deep silence of nothingness, where one can just feel, but can’t touch. Here, body becomes the space in itself.