“From music people accept pure emotion but from art they demand explanation,” lamented the famous abstractionist, Agnes Martin. Manish Pushkale’s abstractionism in Consistent(In)consistency (a solo show held at Akar Prakar recently) is akin to Martin’s in that his vision of the world is distilled into pure, organic form. Reminiscent of the intricate, closely-packed repetitiveness of kantha stitch, his canvases are filled with painstakingly placed marks — from dashes to dots and everything in between.

At first glance, from a distance, the pieces look like topographical maps — Pushkale is a trained cartographer —with subtle shifts in the repetition of patterns and colours marking the unevenness of the terrain. These bird’s-eye-view landscapes are poignant: one can imagine the many lives unfolding on these grounds. The poignancy of Ganesh Haloi’s abstract landscapes may come to mind, but Pushkale chooses maximalism instead of Haloi’s minimalist idiom.

Yet, on closer inspection, these are more than just geographical maps. They could also be aural maps. Where Wassily Kandinsky captures the sheer exuberance of a musical piece, Pushkale is more methodical. Minute but precise shifts inthe pattern of dots and dashes — the titular ‘in consistencies’ — are used to create aflow that draws the eye along a specific path akin to following sheet music. Take,for instance, The Flute. On pursuing the trail that the artist has carefully laid out,one can discover notations of taal, thebasic rhythm structure of Indian classical music. And just as Pandit Ravi Shankar had said about the ‘dissonant note’ making a raga unique, the deliberate irregularities are what set each work apart.

There is also an almost zen-like meditative quality about the canvases, the recurrent shapes putting the readers in a trance. In Dreaming of those 5 Stones, five islands of calm stand out amidst the surrounding noise and darkness like the five precepts of Buddhism.