At first glance, Bholanath Rudra’s skilled watercolours in the exhibition, InsightsAntardrishti (held online by Emami Arts recently), seem like skyscapes shot on camera. But a closer look reveals an eerie, half-lit, post-Anthropocene world where the debris of human existence remain suspended amidst nothingness. In this surreal milieu, the artist drops clues about mankind’s sin — from predatory constructions that encroach upon earth’s idyll to phantasmic figures in PPE suits sifting through the debris in search of life.
Rudra’s technique relies on blending and layering different hues in his paintings, exploiting the soft, luminous and transparent quality of watercolours to create surreal worlds.
Suman Dey, the other artist exhibited, takes a very different approach to voice similar concerns. In the opaque, sombre, matte mixed media canvases, Dey distills visible forms — both animate and inanimate — into abstract motifs. But the shapes are fragile, fraying at the ends, seeming almost like old paper that can be crushed with the slightest of effort. Like humanity, these forms are teetering on the edge of survival. Speckled foxing also mars the shapes, as if acidic pollution is eating away at the shapes. His Landscape I and II hark back to a verdant countryside, with patchwork fields and winding dust lanes.
What ties the works of these unique practitioners is their anxiety about the destructive path that humanity seems to have chosen.
