The seven artists hosted by Gandhar in its recent show, Metaphoric Identity, speak with different accents. If it’s a sense of the besieged self in Promiti Hosain, desolation permeates the works of Saptarshi Ghosh, Ghanashyam Latua and Suresh Singha, while Surajit Biswas offers drawing exercises that ponder the tentative interplay of light, shade and texture. Anxiety over the individual’s space in society is hinted at by Sekhar Baran Karmakar as David Malakar explores his old palette to try out cameos of Varanasi.
Hosain’s Silent Thoughts seem to be audible in pensive whispers that echo fading peripheral refrains. In ink, watercolour, conté and coffee stains, she makes a circle in the middle of a piece of white, handmade paper that’s a self-contained cocoon warding off the outside, as it were. The subtle friction between the private and the public, between furtive emotions and societal norms, lends to Karmakar’s untitled collage a sly, erotic tension as it maps unstated relationships in its cutout figures. As Matisse and Nandalal Bose have shown, the teasing brevity of the genre offers impish possibilities yet.
In the watercolour figuration of both Karmakar and Ghosh, you detect the shadow of Bhupen Khakhar. But the surreal apparition Ghosh composes — of vistas shorn of vegetation, of grey skies and unadorned structures — has the grim resonance of an environmental (nuclear?) disaster. Particularly where a giant rose is hugged by a man with a tail, his body reduced to a see-through shell.
Malakar remains obscure in his series, Benaras, but the environmental rumination continues in the works of the three other artists. A lone branch hangs in Biswas’ Home series as though to protect it from weathering, while Latua’s Khoai Landscape (picture) evokes, with pricks of the pin and a fine mesh of ink lines, the stark beauty of Santiniketan’s iconic wasteland threatened with extinction. Singha, too, laments over a wasteland, where bare boulders preside over singed grass and parched soil, an uprooted tree and bleakness: simple images of reckless abuse ominous of an impending crisis.