Have adventurous young artists, often seduced by new media in recent years, re-discovered the virtues of traditional tools? Svikriti, 2020, Birla Academy’s show of the 10 award-winners of last year’s Annual, seemed to suggest just that, with most of them reposing faith in traditional media. Around the same time there was a solo show of Partha Pratim Deb at Emami Arts, titled Gestures. And all this veteran needed to turn out a peppy series were ink, paper and, of course, a quirky imagination.
The awardees first. You find that imagination is something Pooja Ghosh isn’t short of as she delves into Bedtime Episodes to come up with unnerving hallucinations with tattered, frayed, diaphanous shrouds and withered skeletal forms pregnant with premonitions of death. In Contemplation, identity disintegrates as strips of photographed portraits-perhaps her own, acquired through image transfer possibly-are corroded into scratchy, blackened fragments. In fact, an enquiry into identity, into its elusive borders, its gender markers that begin in the womb, lends to this thoughtfully crafted series a pensive edginess.
An artist who exploits charcoal and acrylic to conjure up a suffocating toxicity is Sukanta Hazra. From sagging mosquito nets to trees to an urban skyline, nothing escapes the thick soot that chokes a doomed land. Environmental awareness also persists in Anirudra Mondal’s series, The Earth, turned into bleak, ragged, bereft topographies. Owanka Bhattacharjee’s ceramics (picture, left) resonate with biomorphic ambiguity. Although Wholeness and Disruption are two different works, they make a binary pair as the orb of the first, split open in the second, transitions into a kind of fruit with a fleshy core. Honeycomb formations, rippling curlicued contours, earthy vertical tunnels that recall the tunnels of burrowers give his oeuvre a distinctive stamp.
A ceramic sculpture by Owanka Bhattacharjee. Birla Academy
Shahanshah Mittal’s muted tones and understated scheme are a contrast to the dark, craggy, relief patterns of Bibek Roy. Kanchan Karjee’s video is smart but rather déjà vu, while Ushnish Mukhopadhyay, inspired by a Poe story and, of course, Bunuel, is clever with animation but too self-consciously European-surreal.
Now for the senior, Partha Pratim Deb, still a perky tease at 77. Critic Pronab Ranjan Roy, in his catalogue essay, is insightful about Deb, pointing to his ‘kinship” with the inimitable Sukumar Ray. If society is an asylum of oddballs — caught in enigmatic activity with unreadable gestures — Deb’s prognosis, not unlike Ray’s, echoes with sublime nonsense that’s infectious in its wit and sensitively observant in its probe.
In one suite of drawings his lean lines weave tensile nets that set off optical tricks with multiple angles and dimensions, creating suspended stations for spry little tableaux with funny little figures doing strange things that defy logic. In another, there are fetching objects that look suspiciously, slyly animate in Deb’s impish wonderland, created with whimsical squiggles, daubs and a fine mesh of lines. In a third set — done with ink, graphite and pastel, networked with marks that cohere densely at places but loosen into frayed borders — a sense of flux is palpable.
His playful squint edits, details and focuses on bald outlines in ink —black on white — in his human menagerie, reducing figures to simplified, gauche forms in a way that call for limericks as accompaniment (picture, right). The linocut series — white on black — is, if anything, catchier, crazier and again invites vintage nonsense, whether like Ray’s, or Carroll’s or Lear’s.
