BEYOND THE VISIBLE

A SOLO SHOW BY Prabhakar Kolte

The Contemplative Journey of
Exploring Prabhakar Kolte’s Art

For us, those who have been seeing the most intriguing, exhilarating works of Prabhakar Kolte in the past several years, each occasion to view his art is a very special one. Once again, it offers a torrential flow of colours and lines, resulting in images to celebrate and think about.
His abstraction knows no bounds. Colour pours from his brush, awakening the canvas to images that tell the tales of the innermost cores of dreaming, images that slowly emerge and remain with both — the artist and us.
Each canvas becomes a field in which imagination and submerged memories — of energies, movements, and associations — surface and coalesce, shaping a sensory and perceptual experience through which we arrive at our own way of seeing. Here, the artist’s ‘tales’ create the conditions for our own to take form — free to wonder, to wander.
A work from the 1990s reveals a dense, charged surface animated by ochres, blacks, reds, and whites. The forms in some of his earlier works carry echoes of figures, tools, creatures, or ritual objects. His recent works mark a shift in temperament and tonal climate — from energetic immediacy toward a more contemplative poise, articulated through increasingly economical gestures.
In one work, broad green strokes veil earlier layers, much like urban surfaces reclaimed by monsoon-darkened moss. In another, similarly superimposed white carries a slightly industrial, chalky weight. Drips and vivid layers of blue, red, and yellow peek through intermittently, like glimpses through fogged glass, where pauses become as meaningful — and as enchanting — as speech.
One wonders if this act of layering reflects the way nature and human-made surfaces live alongside or overlap each other — or if it rather turns inward, touching on the experiences, emotions, and histories that layer and settle within individuals, cultures, or physical places, influencing the present without being directly visible, much like geological sediment forming rock layers.
In an age of instant consumption and visual excess, this measured dialogue between concealment and revelation — whether deliberate or instinctive — assumes the quality of resistance. Its beauty lies in this refusal to conclude, much like a poem that resists immediate closure through devices like enjambment, fragmentation, and an emphasis on process over a fixed message.

Kolte’s interest in literature, poetry and mythology is reflected in his works. The pace, sensitivity and energy with which colour is spread across the canvas lend the paintings a haunting, almost magical quality. The brightness and inherent light of these hues captivate us, encouraging a natural, prolonged focus.

Viewing Kolte’s works easily becomes a journey — one in which we engage not only with the images before us, but also with what is implied, absent, or left unresolved. This journey is spontaneous: the viewer cannot anticipate what will emerge next, nor approach the work with fixed expectations. As Ranjit Hoskote aptly observed about his work in 1990, “Kolte wishes his viewer to become a true explorer — one who does not rely on maps to guide him, but makes them as he travels.”

A work which engages us in many ways, whether figurative or abstract, becomes dear to us. And precisely the very quality and the core of Kolte’s work is this, that we find ourselves in the midst of an enchantment which envelopes us, and awakens in us the desire to dig deep into our experiences, memories, and to travel to unknown territories.

Kolte’s works thus set us on a shared path of creative pursuit, through which we begin to ‘reform,’ for our own pleasure, our understanding of both art and life. It is worth noting that the contemporariness of Kolte’s work is seminally inherent in all of his creations, and brings us closer to them quite easily, and the integrity of his visual language draws us into pure, sustained delight.

The selected works of Kolte, displayed in this show, are going to be with us for their sheer sensitivity and visual grace, for a long time.

Prayag Shukla Mumbai
Poet & Art Critic 10th December 2025