The first work that immediately holds your attention in Synchrome Monsoon, Akar Prakar’s online presentation, is Manir Mrittik’s black and white photo tapestry, Alternative Masterpiece 2, which alludes to Munch’s Scream. Its distortions are cleverly wrought by slicing the image into loosely-dangling strips that become shifting vertical slats through which some chilling horror is accidentally glimpsed. That takes the work to the edge where illusion tips over into brutal reality. The inference of socio-psychological fragmentation in a climate of atavistic conflicts and senseless violence comes across quite readily.
The strange ways in which reality blinks through illusion intrigues the viewer in Debasish Mukherjee’s fabric-and-thread Portrait series, as well. Top layers of the weaves, coming apart in tousled threads, sag with fatigue, age and decay. But where they are stripped away, the bald patches expose the tightly ribbed rhizome underneath which promises to endure. On the other hand, Piyali Sadhukhan’s tapestries with handmade paper, fabric, bangles and acrylic create elaborate floral patterns of a classic, period richness, especially in Udaan.
With Chandana Hore, as with much of Expressionism, oil is some kind of emotional refuge: its thick wads seem to absorb anxiety in its brusque strokes. Hence, though a garden blooms in Untitled, the two figures in Misha’s Dream don’t make a couple, but are clearly isolated in each other’s lonely silence. An artist who’s explored the sensuous thingness of material and medium — jute, paper, oil — for undefined palimpsestic residues is Jayashree Chakravarty. In Nature Whispers there are, apart from its peahens, tangled scraps that a digital image cannot do justice to. Manish Pushkale, however, artfully starves oil of its body to turn it into intangible, diaphanous, overlapping stains that appear like hallucinatory figments, imminent with echoes from memory, though undecipherable, fading. And the sculptor, Debanjan Roy, is obviously stimulated by Pop art and Koons in his tongue-in-cheek tribute to Gandhi, depicting the old man as a superhero.
Among the seniors, Somnath Hore’s gaunt protagonists and Akbar Padamsee’s delicate watercolours have an ageless appeal.
