Untitled Document

I have a personal liking for Devi Lal Patidar. Both in life and his work he is simplicity personified. The other aspect of his is that he is generally dissatisfied with his work. I consider these to be the most important qualities in an artist. These make him work hard leaving him little time to think of himself or of his achievement.
In the present day world where art, even modern art, has become a commodity, Patidar is not an achiever but a creator in his own right. His unassuming manner stuns, so does some of his work for the same reason. Which is why his insects crawl without moving and his lanterns glow without burning.

............................................................................................................................................................................................................- Jitendra Kumar

The ceramic sculptures of Patidar’s may appear wild and inchoate, but this is where his creative joy is safe and this is where the seeds of possibility lie hidden. Art that does not bread the rhythm of tradition is not art-it could be craftsmanship or a sleight of hand.

Patidar’s lanterns are made out of clay, In these lanterns their shapes commingle with sex symbols. Viewing male-female sexulity in the light of these images gives them a different meaning.
Marx has written somewhere that sex is the highest activity of mankind because thereby they reproduce themselves. This continuity of life may possible have given birth to the concept of immortality. The merger of sex symbols into the lantern is the continuity of a primeval passion as well as its social context.

The deeper we delve into our memory with the lantern, the more vibrant meanings of it will unravel before us. There is no glass or tin sheet here, but even these ultimately are the products of the earth. And, for the Indian psyche the body too….

The artists who are immersed in the trying task of saving art are in fact engaged in saving mankind. Devi Lal Patidar is one such rare artist.
In Patidar’s sculptures there is the compassion of being sculpture. It runs as an undercurrent beneath the compassion of the subject. There is such natural sentiment in the harmony of form, in texture and colour that the existence of form is a quiet evolution, not a substitute for some object but of existene in its own right, a process of its own-a process flowing through the ephemeral.
The memory of a lantern is not in the lantern. There is a different lantern of memory.
Because it is formed out of a memory of a form, memory lives by itself in the process of formation. An image of a moment in this process is the lantern of Patidar.

Art here is like truth realizing itself.

The art of Patidar is a pointer to truth being interactive and a moment of the dynamic of this process captured in a medium becomes an artistic creation.

His Sculptures seek to discover the divers facets of creation and nature in a mood of total absorption. He takes the gift of nature, earth into his hands and his fingers begin to search for live forms from the unfathomable depths of the ocean.
He infuses such life-force in them that the earthen body not only gives the impression of being real but also expresses itself.
He gives desire a body-elemental uncovered body-the incarnation of desire. A body of his ecstatic thought and vision.
Even the lantern has a body. It also aspires to become natural and primordial.
It seeks continuity by itself. By itself it seeks to perpetuate its light. The artist gives it human form, the way it desires and the lantern becomes ecstatic.
These sculptures light the very spots and merge in time. To fulfills desire, the artist liberates them in clay.