Two bags hang from the wall, wrinkled with fine folds and stretched by the weight and shape of their contents. But they have been hewn out of wood by Arjun Das, one of the two artists presented by Ganges Art Gallery in its recent show, Entities Define Us. Exploiting verisimilitude, he depicts utterly commonplace objects to appropriate the familiar as creative fodder, divesting rotis and spatula, grater and eggbeater of their function to look at them as form.
Other works, however, are not free of bristly comments. In They are deceived, abandoned luggage makes you wonder: did the scattered pieces belong to migrant labourers? An engraving, Jaskilaathiuskibhains, questions the Hindi adage that says the bullock belongs to whoever wields the stick.
The artist is at his best in the series titled, But their histories are not symmetric (picture), which approximates the aerial mapping of a devastated topography. This results from patterning colour-coated paper with uneven, textured tiles of synthetic clay bleached by soldering. In one work, it seems that the earth is thoroughly denuded, parched, cracked, while in another, a tangled chaos of hectic, tearing lacerations is pregnant with warning.
In Signage, the clay, mixed with colour ink, layers the paper and is then imprinted with striae of a tyre in one work and of bulging, threadbare weave in some others. In the best of them, it is spread in fluent sweeps with fine lines and the marks of a needle turning the mass into supple cables tied in bunches.
What makes Kaushik Halder noticeable is the humour that infuses both his suites: one in papier mâché, firmed with a metal armature, the other on the paper of his ink drawings. If Grow up is a jackfruit trying to scratch its own prickly back, U & I shows a fork mutated into a hooded snake, while the maddening rush of leaving for work is treated with winking levity in A Crazy morning. The same playfulness buoys his spry, impromptu drawings as well.