An eerie silence and stillness pervaded both the gallery space and the works of Indrapramit Roy at his solo exhibition, Soliloquy (Emami Art, February 24-April 15). There were moments frozen in time — the howling wind of the desert has been arrested, the roaring of the ocean hushed, the din of the city lulled, and all human presence erased from the scenes.
Yet, these were not the ‘decisive moments’ à la Cartier-Bresson. Instead, they seemed perfectly mundane — cacti in the desert, ripples in the water, a cityscape at night. These were overlaid with various textual soliloquies — anxieties that afflict the artist, prophecies of a grim future, dire warnings from the past and so on. This juxtaposition of landscapes and words epitomises Roy’s forte, which has been to use aspects of the spatial to begin psychological conversations. It is as the American artist, Wayne Thiebaud, had said — one paints what is ‘paintable’ but they stand in for far more than just their visible form.
A lot of the works were inspired by the pandemic, and the worry of those fraught times comes through loud and clear. Take, for instance, the under-construction buildings towering into the sky but shorn of the buzz of activity that always cloaks them — where have all the people gone? Are they alive? Will they return? In the sky above the tower which has been cleared of construction dust and pollution, Orion twinkles, a silent witness to the travails of humanity. The most ominous are the landscapes painted in rusty shades of dried blood, where heavy clouds of foreboding darken the skies.
Roy’s skill with watercolour is evident throughout the show, but where it really shines is in the way he paints water. The changing hues of water as its surface is disrupted by ripples are fascinating and lend a sense of motion to the works — a difficult ask in a flat medium like watercolour. The intricately dense cross-hatching in a piece depicting the lives of people cooped up in isolation in their houses during the lockdown also lends a sense of depth to the medium.