The pandemic is in its third year and has already inspired artists across the globe. Despair, hopelessness and dejection are often writ large in artwork. But Santanu Debnath takes a different approach in A Simple Life, an online exhibition hosted by Emami Art. There is not one mask in sight in his paintings, but this does cause anxiety for Debnath’s artworks bring together moments of a lost idyll suspended in time.

Set in Betpukur, a village in Burdwan, the lush shades of Debnath’s work capture the simple beauty of his village. The verdant shades of green that flood his palette have a soothing effect on nerves frayed by the stress of these fraught times. Debnath notices families coming together and the return of the lost games of childhood as people are forced to trace their steps back to the village amidst lockdowns.

But there’s a melancholy to this leisure, a pensiveness about the acute financial crisis, the loss of work and education, that hangs like a mist around Debnath’s pastoral scenes. The finesse of his brushstrokes — painstakingly cross-hatched shades — impart an earthy texture to his frames. In some finely-detailed pieces, one can almost hear the murmur of leaves and the rustle of the grass.

However, the alienation of modern city life colours Debnath’s way of seeing his village. Is it quiet solitude that he sees? Or is it the silence of desolation?