Also a recipient of numerous other prestigious awards, like Rockefeller 3rd Fund, Pollock-Krasner and NYFA to name a few, in the past, Vinod has been practicing visual art in a wide variety of mediums and has exhibited internationally including at Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Peabody Essex Museum, Museum voor Volken Kunde, P.S. 1/MoMA and Houston Museum of Contemporary Art among others and his works are in global public and private collections including those of some of the museums where he has exhibited.. Though fellowships are awarded to recognize the merit and maturity of an artist’s work, winning one is highly competitive. The Gottlieb Foundation received 616 submissions from the world over this year. The Gottlieb Fellowship was conceived in order to recognize and support the serious, fully-committed artist and since 1976, it has been making grants to outstanding painters, sculptors and printmakers worldwide. Their merit is judged on the level of intellectual, technical, and creative development and commitment to artistic goals maintained during an artist's career.
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Vinod’s work mostly belong to four main chronological/stylistic phases that cover his career of over thirty years. Dave’s adventurous journey into the avant-garde is marked with strikingly attention commanding turns at at every phase wise interval. His first phase hauntingly explores the personal world of human psyche, loneliness and its mortal fantasies. Bat, female nude, dog and a variety of disembodied garments and graphically suggestive of what have been inside of them re-encode the innermost contradictive layers of human mind that resemble the super realistic drama in a dream pushing the mortal and often erotic twilight zone to the limits of ambiguity and authenticity. Executed with accuracy of a surgeon’s knife, in this phase he shows his superb craft with the help of his both seeing eyes. This is important as with the beginning of the second phase of his visual journey, the artist is rendered blind in one eye and that challenging condition has led him to come to terms with the lack of spatial depth in his one-eyed vision by inventing a new way of seeing and translating it into painting.
With the start of the second phase, one can clearly notice the artist’s personal struggle of visual handicap taking him away from his masterly renderings of things which is replaced by a different but equally, perhaps more compellingly illuminating way of depiction. His personal struggle now takes on the stage and stands for the conflicts of humanity in general. Violence in the global arena, man's inhumanity to man, the daily dose of bad news that we digest with our breakfast via news media each morning now become his necessity to be addressed and he exactly does that with remarkable competence via exploring inventive elements of visual language and mixed-media. The second phase becomes as social and political as a daily newspaper with stains of bloody violence trying to pollute our morning coffee. Using endless news imagery of collapsed humanity and political bullshit, he now makes the captured still moment frozen by the photo journalist’s lens move again. Taking out of the context of the headlines of the front pages, he mercilessly disfigures the imagery to match it to the manmade blemishes on global social canvas. The result is a disquisition of the real and the abstract boiling down to our shared struggles. And color takes over these visual puzzles engendering the unquiet of the violence of winning the war.
In third phase he turns to nostalgia in a unique way trying to come to term with personal tragedies and win over the conflicts of life in yet another way. Familiar with art movements, from pop to post-modern, Vinod Dave manipulates the language of iconography for a subversive objective. But his interest is more than superficial. The interface between divinity and violence, the sharp collision of ancient and modern is evoked. In him, a pastiche of Indian images seen through a retro-nostalgic lens, served up in a modernist frame provide a key to the complexity of the Diaspora imagination. That love and longing for the homeland are inextricably welded with a sharp sense of critique. Dave’s chosen language greatly determines how he looks retroactively at the socio-cultural fabric and he pierces and pokes at the very fabric itself to reveal its hauteur and inconsistency. Established notions of hierarchy and heroism suddenly appear specious and gods, demythified and flying precariously through a landscape of violence and collapsed values - their acts of divinity, conquering evil, conferring blessing, sending out rays of blessings, now suddenly look like the privileged few living among us. He combines mediums and interlinks the opposites to suggest conflicts. By juxtaposing the opposites, he creates depth and to heightens the tension between the dualities of life.
The loss of vision in one eye and lack of spatial depth/distance will continue to play their roles in his art for life. So he ‘invented’ a different way of ‘seeing.’ He juxtaposes graphic marks-making/text/shapes against fluidly painted surface to heighten tension between contrasting opposites and create a ‘feeling’ of spatial depth. Observe and you will notice the difference in the works done before the accidental vision loss, and the works done after it. In photography, he does that by using full open aperture vs. short focal length. In his current project, it's mechanically printed material vs. manual work.
His latest phase is a project of turning wasted published products into art works on a small scale effort of reversing the ungrateful man’s cruelties to our planet. The presses and printers world over are operating their slaughter machines 24/7 churning out unnecessary over supply of books, periodicals, business reports, utility bills, bank statements, catalogs, flyers and junk mail. Majority of published products end up as unread utter trash without their covers ever being opened, rendering mother earth more treeless every passing moment. Vinod goes around like a rescuer garbage man picking up this trash and bringing it back to his studio where he treats his finds with carefully selective compassion. Then he paints on their pages, relates each page to the next, eliminates the verbal narrative by replacing it with a successive visual one, appropriating images if they came with the trashed books and telling an entirely different epic of concerned and highly creative recycling. And what a down to earth approach to display of these works of book arts by allowing viewer participation - viewers can pick up books from the display for closer observation and when they put them back, the display’s shape and size alter, as if, giving the books their organic origin back. Though both the viewer and the artist know that no one can reverse the enormous proportion of harm already done to our environment in the name of progress, he does his civic/artistic duty faithfully anyway and his journey leaves its lasting mark at this juncture as effectively as it does at every turning point in his career.
It is of little surprise that the ongoing recognition is bestowed upon his work by the prestigious and cultivated institutions time after time. Now that is a reminder that he is among a special breed of artists who are building a slow-paced but strong and long term foundation for exceptionally meaningful work of substance that would remain above art’s commercial arena. Dave would not have been what he is today, a talented and remarkable painter, if it were not for his superb craftsmanship and later his inventive strategies in lieu of it, his uncommonly frank creative language, his sensitivity and his consistent approach to painting and to the themes of his choice.
-Jerry Saltz
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