Imaging today

Just as Van Gogh once predicted, painting has indeed become subtle today “more like music and less like sculpture.” The language of expression has become more dramatic than the topic. Going through an exhibition in the city by four new artists at the Srimati Art Gallery in Lansdowne, it was not hard to be unaware of the tension between the themes and the styles of the paintings per se.

Voicing a dissent against the unstable social ethos and the prevailing cultural mores, the exhibition targeted that “Invisible Catalyst” – an apt title of the exhibition – in today’s life that shapes the artist’s thoughts. Palash Paul, Manik Chandra Kandar, Sujit Saha and Arun Shankar Roy shared a fair commonality in terms of the theme – the crisis in the human spirit faced with the threats of instability in today’s social and emotional living.

Palash Paul’s two colour canvases spoke through a potent symbol of strength and vitality – a horse, which was seen swinging up towards a red light or struggling to reach a microphone to attain, as it were, a democratic voice of protest. The strength of lines and colours was reminiscent of a diffused Cubism, with light and shadow areas standing out in both the foreground and the background. Sujit Saha’s visual commentary on the emptiness of today’s cyber romances or the emotional crisis faced by men and women due to unfair competition at all levels was not without the healing touch of hope. In one of the paintings, it came in the form of an unsullied childhood dream – paper boats floating in a puddle.

Contemporary art speaks through many – often incomprehensible – dialects. In “Invisible Catalyst” too, the lay viewer would not have succeeded in deducing much more than what meets the eye first.

Art sustains life. In a very interesting converse, Manik Chandra Sarkar depicted a dream world where the subjects in the painting seemed to ooze out of their framed realities into the world outside. Vivid colours and dissolving lines ensured a layered visual narrative.

However, in Arun Shankar Roy’s works, there seemed a dearth both of the imaginative and of the illustrative quality. The line drawing was weak and the freshness of the colours was smudged in places.

Organised by the World Wide Forum for Rights Protection for the welfare and assistance of distressed street children, this exhibition of about thirty paintings in oil and mixed media was open daily till 23 July.


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