These mirror-like images in black and white, and a hundred shades in between, are about introspection. The imagery has the dynamic balance of mudras which are an integral part of the Indian aesthetic. Two hands opening out like a flower to reveal the fragrance of life within.

- Gangadharan Menon 

  Art Teacher and Writer-Photographer of Nature and Wildlife

"I have followed Venkatesh Pate’s journey from a very fine advertising illustrator to an accomplished painter with an ever-growing international reputation. In this extraordinary transformation, some things have remained unchanged: his integrity, his honesty, and his simplicity. He has put his soul onto his canvasses."

- Mohammed Khan 

  Veteran Adman 

"Venkatesh Pate is my artist friend, who has two beautiful studios, one in the suburbs of Mumbai, and the other within the sylvan settings of Lonavala. His first intense passion as I have seen is ‘positively’ art though, he had earlier been engaged in Art & Design of elegance and beauty. From simpler renderings with pen and ink to complex printing on varied material, Pate excels with a certain dignity and discipline. Surprisingly he has the other avocation ‘Farming’, And, despite his busy schedule, he emerged as a distinctive figurative abstractionist of the new era that outmodes all extensions of the conventional canvas painting, it must be emphasized. This temperament which Pate, as noticed, has been carrying throughout his canvas ever since I met this graceful personality more than a decade before; when his works were first exhibited at the Tao Gallery in Mumbai. He perceives more than a fair consistency in his works since then, yet his expressions evolving powerfully through a body language that is ‘Yogic’. A Yoga practitioner himself, Pate introduces this rhythm of the body language leading to a systematic understanding of the ‘Chakras’, engaging which, the mundane could be released. While the body postures indicated by a delineation or a contour forming the matrix, it is an abstract expression; in a sense the matter is transformed from significant metaphors to reveal the inner plea for recognition of a higher principle as ‘Soul’ in quest. In the process, the yogic postures are not the conventional picture-making, but a complex formation that entails an inward-looking sensibility. The focus, therefore, is on the subject for Pate’s embedded monochromatic images within a colorless backdrop, are allowed to speak volumes on its own, assuming ‘Enigmatic’ bodily structures so constructed. To me, Venkatesh Pate’s works speak that much."

- V. Hariraam 

  Abstract Painter