Sacred Garden emerges as concept derived from the sacred groves known in Marathi as the  Devrai – a part of the  forest that is communally protected and has a significant religious connotation for the community that protects it. In Subash Awchat’s solo exhibit Devrai he presents a unique extensive oeuvre we see an artist successfully attempting to join literature to figurative painting, much like the painters of the renaissance. He bares himself releasing an interiority of emotion and aesthetics. Awchat paints from memory,  a nostalgia from childhood , perhaps the sacred forest in his childhood village of  Otur is degraded and lost to a joyful past. It becomes sacred and sacrosanct in the personal realm.

The Sacred Grove is a philosophy in Africa,  a ritual in the Amazon,  an inheritance in the Americas,  a healer in Australia and it should not become a memory in India. Awchat does not replace the grove with an image of nostalgia but rather he proposes an abstraction as a realm to meditate and think.  Subash Awchat realigns his personal history to the present through the perspective of the sacred grove as the thematic of his paintings.  Its uncontrolled,  unkept and ‘natural’ organic self is brought to flutter with colour. There is no disdain and there is no urgency; rather a reflection, as he proposes poetry that can be read and its resonance found in our actions.