For some years, Deepak Shinde has been exploring the animal world to create appropriate metaphors for the human world, perhaps to underline the loss of purity of the primeval streams of human impulses - passion, love and detachment. His animal figures - fish, monkeys, tigers, elephants, bulls, deer, fox, chameleons, parrots - with their gestures and movements and in their abstraction indicate a mythic representation of life processes. His canvases are temptingly pleasing, bathed as they are in a certain philosophical and primordial light.

Shinde's art seems to be shedding off the coarse physicality and exploring the innermost recesses of existence. Yet a kind of primitive and unblemished lust seems to permeate the whole of his universe. Notable examples are his canvases that focus on monkeys and fish where they seem to be swimming in an aquarium - like green and yellow forest or the canvas in which the male and female monkeys and a fish are involved in come sort of a cosmic drama of origin. Deepak Shinde says: "Our classics consider the fish as the original life form, bringing into being the rest of the animal world. And science says that man evolved from the ape. The togetherness of the fish and the ape is the integrated expression of the two metaphors of life." This fish-ape metaphor on his canvases represent an important point in his journey as an artist while underlining his philosophical quest and his achievement as a colorist.

Deepak Shinde will be exhibiting his works of art at Jehangir Art Gallery, Mumbai after a gap of three years. His forthcoming exhibition titled "Intimate Allegories" brings together 24 of his recent paintings, giving us a glimpse of the animal kingdom where nature still rules through the primacy of the instinct.