Parallel universe of figure & form

Three young minds, three radical expressions, three visions, as it were. The Other Vision, the ongoing show at Studio 21, offers viewers a parallel universe of figure, form and lineation, a glimpse of the creative impulses of those at the up-and-coming fringe of the city’s art spectrum.

Sambaran Das, Goutam Khamaru and Anup Mondal, all in their late 20s, collectively conjure up images of urban disconnect. While the artists may not know one another or may not be very familiar with the other’s work, their conjoined milieu shares themes of abandonment and despair, giving shape to “other” images, of not just what the eyes see, but what it perceives.

The Expressionist lines of Sambaran, primarily using a tonal palette heavy in shadowy, muted browns and black, offer a deconstructed torso of an Everyman, an office-goer, replete with his leather portmanteau, sighing up without a head in Hole; an insect eye sits atop a figure lying head down on a taktaposh, transformed perhaps during a siesta on a lazy Sunday afternoon in Metamorphosis. Elsewhere, Sambaran handles a chaotic passenger compartment in Main Line Dailies; his vision of the entire jamboree presented in a surreal light, bathed in warmer tones of ochre, occasionally emphasised. Everyone’s present: the fruit seller, the ubiquitous newspaper reader, the card players, a bored standing throng, the gutkha-seller. The panorama is disturbed, and metamorphoses occur here as well. Sambaran’s strength, however, lies in his inanimate studies, the charcoal drawing-like quality of dry brush acrylic-on-canvas offering infinite interpretations of loneliness as its essence.

Goutam works with his sense of humour in place. His six works, called Animal Series I to VI, are in mixed media, tempera and acrylic. In each, magical creatures animate frames, not as one particular being, but as expressions. A composite of eyes, body colour, legs, tails and horns, these are figurative abstracts, his creations familiar yet not easily recognisable. His is an ornate style that fixes the gaze with its vibrant tonal palette, primarily warm in nature. In Animal Series V, the fanged hunter that pounces upon its prey actually flaunts a peacock-like plumage on its physical shape, whereas the hunted is done in black-and-gold reticulates. Functional opposites collide to question the Natural world.

Anup, whose twin works are both in aluminium wire and wood, offers details only when required. Both expressions of suffering, Blake’s Lamb and Persistence of Becoming Numb, are agonised figurations that perhaps needed more company to fit into context. Typically without a cognitive face, his aluminium figures are distorted, disjointed shapes that seem to haunt dreams of despair.

The show is on at the Dover Terrace address till February 12.

As appeared in The Telegraph Metro, January 30, 2010