Reviews, Moorings and Sculpture

Reviews

Inside Outside,
The Indian Design Magazine:
"Lean, taut bodies appear to extend beyond normal proportions and merge with the animals to form one narrative. Ratilal's sculptures appear weightless and in motion. This, to the viewer, is not only intriguing, but visually very exciting."

Ebrahim Alkazi,
Theater Personality:
"His outlook on art is clear. He likes doing strenuous work, and seeing it done. He cannot appreciate works, which an artist has created by taking short-cuts. His wood-carving process take weeks, even months, and the subject he has in mind emerge in a strikingly harmonious manner. His reverberations get full expression."

Moorings

Ratilal Kansodaria grew up in a remote village of Gujarat. A place where life is intertwined with nature and untouched by the complexities of urban life. A place where there is an unshaken faith in God and every festival is celebrated with colour and fervour. Where rituals and beliefs remain intact, from birth to death. Where, after a hard day's toil in the fields, men and women find release in dances and songs and tears.

In this lovely warm atmosphere of the village Ratilal experienced the touch of wet clay. He made toys of clay. He carved idols out of limestone. He fashioned tiny wooden sculptures and he drew gigantic rangoli designs with brightly coloured powder. It was inevitable that he became an artist.

As a child, he would watch birds criss-cross the sky, and think of air planes. To him, birds circling endlessly, gliding effortlessly appeared to have reached God. He would dream of flying.

Ratilal still dreams of flying. Oneness with nature is an essential part of his life. As is the happiness derived from the day-to-day, the mundane. For him, the village is the whole world. Wherever you may be, if you remember your village, it is as good as offering prayers to God. The fragrance of this belief pervades Ratilal's mind, and therefore his sculpture.

Sculpture

For his wooden carvings, Ratilal rarely chooses cubical blocks of timber, with their inherent geometrical restrictions.

Instead, he prefers irregularly shaped tree trunks with extended branches. This form of the material gives him the freedom to transgress boundaries and handle it in figurative compositions. Moving away from geometrical constraints has allowed him to discover his own unique form sense. In the absence of finite limits, there occurs within his sculptures, a constant pushing; ceaselessly moving in all directions. The form-sense that Ratilal has evolved through working with wood has led him to similar structures and components of imageries in his bronzes. Not only are the bronze forms in constant flux, but having been released from the prison of the straight plane, they seem to fly. A warm reddish patina applied to the bronze sculptures further consolidates a fraternal relationship with their wooden counterparts.

Ratilal's sculptural form often extends horizontally, rendering it as both a narrative as well as a landscape. A significant continuity emerges between the viewer's space and the space within the sculpture.

His figures are characterized by a certain elongation of the limbs and body proportions of both humans and animals. Strength and movement, physicality of bare bodies, force, posture and muscular tension make for fascinating visual experience. In recreating the backbone of the rural setting, Ratilal acknowledges the human spirit and its ongoing zest for life.