Suryakant Lokhande's Mumbai exhibition, Every Day Is A Cheat Day, is a spectacle of indulgence

A jungle clearing, thick with colour and theatrical promise. Cartoon figures peer through binoculars, pose for cameras, consult guidebooks, climb vehicles, perform curiosity. Elephants hover nearby, parrots puncture the air with colour, and the entire scene hums with activity. Yet nothing truly advances. The figures are busy, alert, even excited, but suspended in a state of perpetual observation. This is the emotional terrain of #EveryDayIsCheatDay, Suryakant Lokhande’s ongoing exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Indian Art, where indulgence has slipped from exception into routine and desire loops back on itself.

What Suryakant Lokhande's exhibition talks about

Suryakant’s paintings operate through familiarity. His protagonists are borrowed from mass culture, figures loaded with childhood memory, global circulation, and emotional shorthand. They arrive smiling, wide-eyed, instantly legible. But stripped from their original narratives and placed inside scenes of abundance, they begin to misbehave. Their optimism feels rehearsed. Their curiosity reads as labour. Pleasure becomes something enacted rather than felt.

The exhibition’s title functions as both slogan and diagnosis. As Suryakant explains, “The title comes from the way indulgence has become part of everyday life rather than an exception. ‘Cheat day’ was once about breaking routine, but today excess, distraction, and consumption feel continuous and normalised.” The hashtag is not incidental. It signals a world in which even self-reward is stylised, broadcast, compressed into shareable units. Indulgence is no longer transgressive. It is procedural.

Cartoon imagery is central to how the artist approaches this condition. Rather than signalling escape, these figures become tools of exposure. “Cartoon figures carry innocence, humour, and familiarity. They allow me to approach serious themes—fear, failure, desire, and waiting—without becoming heavy or moralistic,” he says. Their exaggerated expressions absorb contradiction with ease, allowing discomfort to surface gently, then linger.

In the paintings, excess takes many forms. Gold-toned surfaces, props of leisure, staged adventure, the performance of discovery. These elements shimmer, but they do not resolve into fulfilment. Suryakant resists offering the viewer a stable moral position. “The work reflects the surface appeal of consumer culture—its brightness, pleasure, and promise—while also quietly questioning its emptiness and repetition,” he notes. Critique and attraction occupy the same space. Judgement is withheld.

This refusal to resolve tension is one of the exhibition’s defining gestures. Gold recurs as colour, symbol, and atmosphere. It dazzles while flattening depth, coating scenes in a uniform sheen. Suryakant keeps its meaning deliberately unstable. “Gold can signify luxury, success, and desire, but also artificiality and hollowness,” he says. What emerges is a visual economy that mirrors contemporary pleasure itself: immediate, visible, and oddly unsatisfying.

Nostalgia sharpens this unease. The figures recall childhood comfort, weekend television, early fantasies of adventure. Yet they inhabit adult landscapes of accumulation and performance. The result is dissonant. “Nostalgia operates as a double-edged emotion. It recalls childhood comfort and innocence, but when placed in contemporary scenarios of excess, it also highlights how those ideals have been transformed.” The past is not restored here. It is repurposed, pressed into service of a present driven by consumption.

Repetition structures both the compositions and their emotional impact. Characters collect, pose, observe, celebrate. The actions recur with minimal variation, creating a sense of motion without progress. The artist frames this as a condition rather than a problem to be solved. “The repetition becomes both a condition and a question: are we trapped, or are we choosing to remain inside it?” The paintings offer no exit. They insist on endurance.

Crucially, the viewer is not positioned outside this loop. The figures’ knowing smiles and staged gestures feel uncomfortably recognisable. Lokhande acknowledges this implicating effect. “The work functions as a mirror, but one that includes the viewer within its reflection.” Looking becomes participation. Observation turns inward.

Despite their saturated surfaces and playful cast, the works resist easy consumption. Amusement arrives first, but it rarely settles. Lokhande hopes for a delayed response. “I hope viewers feel a mix of amusement and discomfort—laughter followed by recognition.” The paintings linger because they refuse catharsis. They hold pleasure and dissatisfaction in the same frame.

In #EveryDayIsCheatDay, indulgence is stripped of its promise of release. What remains is routine, performance, and the slow erosion of meaning through repetition. Lokhande does not moralise this condition. He stages it. His paintings become arenas where desire circulates endlessly, brightly lit and unresolved. In doing so, they capture a contemporary mood defined less by excess itself than by its persistence, a world where the cheat day never ends, and satisfaction is always deferred.

On view at The ICIA Gallery, Kala Ghoda, till February 14.

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