Alok Bal:
 

Bal is an artist whose imaginative mind is plugged into the city’s landscape while his finger is on the pulse of urban growth. His canvases are filled with the irony of everyday existence and the struggle between concrete and earth, between nature and the intentions of man. Bal’s preoccupation and nadir is to understand the consequences of the tip in the delicate balance of ecology that is bound to human existence.

Trained at the Faculty of Fine Arts, M S University, Baroda, in art after a B.Com from Sambalpur in his native Orissa, the 40-year-old Bal has a touch of the figurative narrative style that is a hallmark of most Baroda trained artists. However, recently the artist has moved towards a more symbolic, if you will, abstract style. Clearing the canvas of clutter Bal concentrates on one symbolic object that fills up his canvas…it could be a fallen tree, an onion that also doubles as a bulb or in this instance, a potted plant.

In these two canvases, Bal does not simply confront his viewer with a plant in a pot but layers the metaphor further. If one looks closely t the pot it is in fact a miniature forest with the figure of a horse standing among the burnt and singed trees. In the background a fire blazes. In the next canvas we see that the horse has morphed into an elephant and the fire is no longer in the distance, but scorching the body of the elephant that stands motionless and trapped among blackened trees.
Hence, Bal constructs a complex narrative within a seemingly simple troupe. After a slew of over 40 shows, the artist has refined and tuned his skill and prowess to evoke a layered dialogue with the issues of Modernity, through a strong and effortless evocation.

 

Birendra Pani:
 

Many strains and influences run through this artist’s creative oeuvre. While absorbing the delicate and complex lines of Orissa Pata paintings, Pani has also be exposed to the Romantic styles of Kolkata’s Santiniketan and the narrative school of Baroda’s Faculty of Fine Arts, M S University. The artist has crystallized these various influences into a toned and disciplined workmanship.

The 40-year-old Orissa born artist has based his recent suite of paintings on the plight of traditional gotipua dancers of his native land. The boy dancers who perform a devotional dance ritual are quickly declining in today’s cosmopolitan workl, Pani makes it a point to entwine his empathy for the dying art with an opinion on our post-Modern era. In that respect, Pani does not try to create nostalgia for the decline in the taste for the dancers, instead he problematizes the issue by bringing in a dispassionate view of the issue.    

The two canvases on display in this exhibition, features the gotipua dancers in different situations. In the first situation Pani has created a hybrid character, with the face of a boy from Orissa but the hair tied in a turban like a Sikh boy. This hybrid character stands against a brick wall next to potted cacti, with only a sliver of landscape in the background visible. What the artist is trying to say in the work is clear through the grouping of metaphors, it is that ties with the natural world and with tradition is slowly but steadily blocked out as the concrete wall of progress raises its ugly head.

The other canvas is a hyper-real portrait, a close shot of a gotipua dancer with liquid innocent eyes and a small smile playing upon his lips he confronts the viewer, while half of his face has been severed by a blade. The blade is a recurring motif in Pani’s work and it has multiple functions and meanings. In this instance its meaning is rather clear—one where modernity eclipses tradition.

 

Debraj Goswami:

The Bengal born Goswami trained as a graphic artist, but for this particular show, he has chosen to show a canvas. While his style of painting differs from both Bal and Pani, he chooses like them, to dwell on a single object, investing it with the power of the metaphor, a signifier for larger issues.
His brush work and stokes harkens back to his days as a graphic artist however the manner in which he renders forms is painterly. His use of acid green and fluorescent yellow lends a surreal atmosphere to the works. 

In these two canvases, the 34-year-old Goswami looks at the environment and the strained environment with its human counterpart. A wooden frame is topped by the head of a white eagle, while the bottom half of this figure is completed by a human hand, clothed in a torn rubber glove. A hook pierces the middle finger while the thumb peeps out. To complicate the image further, the shadow of the glove appears to be the wings of the eagle.

There could be several readings to this but one that fits well is of rebellion and protest. The eagle seems to be fighting back at human domestication and exploitation. It is a larger comment on the pyramid of life that challenges the supremacy of mankind.

In the other canvas Goswami has quoted an artistic reference. The thinker by Auguste Rodin has long been a symbol for civilized man. The ability to reason, remember and create history is what set man apart from animals. Yet this colossal statue seems to be humbled from its throne of greatness as it is housed in a child’s paper boat with holes in it. The artist is most likely making a reference to the melting ice caps that threaten one day to submerge the world in a watery grave.

 

Hariprasad Tripathy:
 

This artist was once a student of zoology, before he turned to his creative side. After studying at Santiniketan in Kolkata he moved to Baroda where he studied painting. The 26-year-old Orissa born artist, has been part of many group shows and workshops, but is yet to have his solo.

Early in his career, Tripathy shows sophistication in understanding and portraying interior spaces, much like the Surrealist Giorgio de Chirico who produced many of the most iconic images of the surrealist era.
However the comparison ends at the representation of space, because the tropes created by Tripathy are not intended to evoke a surreal experience, rather they are rooted in empathy for middle class aspirations and dreams.

 The first of the two canvases in this show, is an amalgamation of several views of a house, you see the decorative panel, the brick wall with a sewing machine upon it and a hint to another room. A dark outline in at the top register of the canvas indicates a neighborhood of similar shaped houses.

The sewing machine is a very Indian, middle class icon and it bespeaks a certain type struggle towards a better life.

The second work plays upon the same emotion, by placing a small pile of pebbles, like an artificial grotto in the middle of a similar setting or home.
Here though, there is no reference to the outside world, only bright yellow walls and mysterious passageways leading to closed doors. The absence of human presence heightens the forlorn nature of the otherwise bright settings. 

 

Kamal Pandya:
 

This Baroda based artist, belongs to that generation of painters who explore urbanity through the metaphor of the edifice. Houses are icons of history, change and aspiration. A collection of houses becomes a symbol of a society, a culture and a civilization.

Working both in two and three dimensional aspects, Pandya creates layers of history and human existence through the edifice. Here a Haveli meets a tenement flat or a street square merges with a neighborhood. The high-rise yields to the slum and the garden or the porch becomes a thing of the past, as every space is snapped up by the urban migrant.
This exhibition showcases two of Pandya’s works. One canvas the other a sculpture made of PVC.

In the first work, we observe the city at night. Each home or edifice is aglow with its own light and the bright colour of each house is swathed in nightlight. The sky hovers over the city a dark impenetrable dome, except for the shooting star that streak s across the sky, or is it a plane? Pandya leave it ambiguous, allowing the viewer to construct his/her own narrative.

The next work evokes the claustrophobia of a city, packed with teaming humanity. Tiny PVC houses are jammed together one, over the other, to form a monolithic pillar—one that mimics a high-rise when viewed from a distance. In tune with his stylistic preference for bright colours, Pandya has painted each house in blue, pink, green and yellow. Not ignoring the caste undertones of these houses—blue is the colour of Dalit homes while green is the colour to denote a Muslim area—Pandya goes on to comment on the impermanent nature of our world made of plastic.

The critique is a subtle one, but its effect is one that lingers.

Kundan Mondal:
 

This Bengal born artist, presents two disparate works for this exhibition, one a watercolor and the other an acrylic on canvas. What ties them together stylistically however is that both inhabit a fantastical world of creatures that belong to the imagination of a wondrous and hallucinating mind. An elephant with eight tales and a spotted headscarf stands upon a splayed man who has no arms instead a series of tubes issues from the front of his body.

Sitting atop the elephant is another man, whose body is balanced at a precarious angle, and once more he has no arms.

One may be tempted to associate the painterly style and the two men and elephant with later painter Bhupen Khakhar. However this painting is bereft of such homoerotic underpinnings. What in conjures instead is a surreal world where man, animal and plant morph into one homogenous being and differentiation is a matter of the past.

In the second work, on canvas, the human presence is suggested by a pair of hanging trousers. However this is no ordinary trouser, as closer examination will reveal. The entire surface of the trouser serves as a small ecosystem, where every animal thrives and inhabits this realm. From a whooping baboon to a scaly green lizard, a whale to an elephant, there are many animals to be spotted within the weave and weft of the fabric.

Outside this picture, exists another world, briefly touched by reality, there is a room with a small window, a switch board and on the wall is a picture of a demon wrestling with a tiger. The experience is almost complete when once more Mondal pushes his viewers back into the world of make-believe, where a belt morphs into a green fanged creature.  A green parrot sits atop this dream world a mute spectator.

Prasnta Sahu:
 

Man asleep with giant flies hovering over him. Red back ground with figures delineated through white outlines. The flies are textured, their wings transparent and veined. Is there a deeper metaphor in this mundane everyday incident? One can read various metaphors, since flies are considered pestilence, perhaps as unwanted as other creatures that fall under the same label. It can be seen as a playful work with deeper undertones. It is a message of coexistence and sharing the planet with other creatures.

Like his colleagues in this exhibition, Sahu has also been down the path of studying at Engineering College in Orissa, turning to art in the late 90s and then following his passion at both Santiniketan and Baroda.

Despite being exposed to highly figurative styles in both schools of art, Sahu has developed a highly cryptic manner of presenting his thoughts, in that respect it borders on abstract symbolism. A narrative is not what he is driving after, instead he presents a situation, with clues that his audience must unravel to come to their own readings of his work. His subtle sense of humor pervades the canvas while his bold colours and restrained style imbues his canvas with a quiet power, which is neither verbose nor highhanded.

 

Pratul Dash:
 

The artist creates grids with coloured lines and fills them patches of colour that resemble, squares, triangles and rectangles. Is this is a tribute to Piet Mondrian’s Broadway Boogie Woogie? Perhaps, one can connote a mild resemblance however these lines have been used not as an abstracting but to allude to the grid of science.
Only half visible is a brown sheep, a subject of much scientific experimentation. Dolly the first clone was created from a sheep, and this half disappearing mammal refers to Dolly. Dash hints to another interpretation, in the far left is a white lamb, a symbol of Christ—the Lamb of God who cleanses the sins of mankind.

To accentuate the divine nature of this sheep, Dash has outlined a spidery apparition of golden wings sprouting out of its back. Brining two interpretations of the sheep and the lamb into the same frame Dash initiates a dialogue on science and religion.

The second work is far more playful and picks on another domestic creature as protagonist—a hen. An egg laying machine that children are introduced to in poetry and fairytales, appears in Dash’s canvas as recurring motif between other strands of the narrative.

A large vertebra is inset with a cutout of an ape alluding to evolution. However there is no clear story being told here. The vertebra simply floats among other popular images of flowers, hearts and comic book characters.  A little girl, a cat and a rooster—the interpretations can be many or one simply enjoy the visual feast laid before the eyes.

 

Rajibalochan Pani:
 

The city as a muse is a recurring theme in this exhibition, and Rajibalochan, has chosen to represent his muse as a fragmented Lego game. In the two canvases that he presents for this exhibition, the city or even town is a series of pale buildings and huts knitted tightly together. In the first canvas the street dog is the purveyor of the city, the dog is often an emblem for the indomitable survival instinct that makes the metropolis tick. In the next canvas an old man’s walking stick takes centre stage as the old man himself can be seen in the distance balancing on the leaves of a delicate golden creeper that has wound its way around the stick. The old man is covered with a shawl and is standing quite upright looking into the sky. Bruised red flower buds at various stages of opening cut across the canvas in a straight horizontal line, the flowers serve as a metaphor for life, while also indicating the gentler, humane side of the big bad city.

 

Ramakant Samantray:

 

The artist paints a dark picture, with a limited palette of, grey-black and yellow.  He chooses a vertical canvas upon which he renders a small boy appears stranded in a low valley surrounded by a precipice of insurmountable rocks. The situation is made perilous by the presence of ominous yellow spiders the size of a house cat. The spiders have surrounded the child from all four sides, and should he by some miracle climb out; the spiders are prepared for a confrontation. In the distance an asphalt road with its black and yellow sidings, appears like a ribbon of hope, a road that may lead to safety and home. The child for now appears to be trapped and doomed.

The second canvas chooses a mythological, though it is set in a similar bleak landscape.  The red earth that shrouds the plateau that appears to be rendered in a style reminiscent of the Miniatures. There are stylized figures, of Lord Ram chasing the golden deer with his bow and arrow placed at the centre of the canvas albeit in the distance. A pile of broken and rusted vehicles and rubble lies at the bottom of this plateau.

On another plateau, Ram and Sita sit under a small tree engaged in intimate dialogue. On the third is a holy man on a tiger skin preaching to no one in particular. In the foreground of the canvas is a large plantain leaf filled with rice lentils and pickle. Perhaps the artist alludes to the survival of tradition and the breaking down of Modern society.

 

Sharmi Choudhury:
 

Moving slightly away from the mankind and nature theme that seems to prevail in this exhibition, Choudhury, picks up another strand of the web. She looks at human relations that move from the family to society. Having studied in Santiniketan and Baroda, Choudhury has a rich vocabulary to pick her style from. She chooses a language removed from Academic Realism or a simple narrative style. She chooses instead elongated and stylized figures, laying them out in the simultaneous narrative seen in the miniatures.

In single canvas that she displays in this show, is a large horizontal work with a rather tragic centerpiece. A prominent female figure strides across a railway track, where several people seem to have laid down or fallen. In her bag the central figures carries a small man, a character from Binod Bihari Mukhrerjee, one of the central fountainheads of creativity and learning at Santiniketan, Bengal. Here perhaps the artist is referring to her artistic baggage. A little ahead of the woman stands a cow that appears to have stopped the train in its tracks. The drama of the center is surrounded by a mise en scene of artistic references from Rabin Mondal to Pieter Bruegel the Elder.

Her colour palette is dominated by reds in this canvas but the others seem to a wash of several colours coalescing and mingling together in a fog.  It is said that Choudhury’s mood is often denoted by her colour palette, hence in this work there is an air of nostalgia and reverie.

 

Shivani Bhalla:
 

With strains of Delhi School of art and Baroda, in her veins, Bhalla has a strong sense of figuration and a predilection of objects of beauty. Her canvases possess a dreamlike quality and narrate a story that is not unlike a fairytale. Looking for the innocent and vulnerable, Bhalla often prefers children and sleeping people as her subjects, and has moved from large to smaller formats.

In the two canvases that feature in this exhibition, Bhalla, displays her love for gold and rich colours while rendering her favourite subject, a little boy. The boy afloat on a pink inflatable has an encounter with a knight in armour that seems to have risen from the waters. The night looks neither menacing, nor benign and has a faraway look in his eyes as his hand hovers over the child’s head. The artist clearly conveys a sense of adventure without resorting to the usual devices of action comics. Her characters appear to float in the neither world. The rest of the composition is surrounded by rain clouds and water lilies.

The second canvas is equally rich in colour and metaphor, as a two children stand facing the viewer. One with his back to us, where we see his heart opened with a tiny man inside. The other faces viewers with a circular hole in his chest exposing a vague patch of red and brown. The cherubic face of the second boy is reminiscent of the attendant angels that flutter over baby Jesus, though the artist has not really made any direct references to a religious theme.

 

Susant Panda:

 

Born into a family of high caste Brahmins, Panda chooses to question caste privileges and social hierarchy. After studying in Orissa at Collage of art and Craft, the artist moved to Baroda and studied at MSU. With a strong figurative style, Panda prefers the using the head study as his main vehicle of expression.

In this particular work the artist has rendered the face of a high caste Brahmin, replete with the vermillion teeka and face ornamentation, this may even be a self portrait, rendered in soft flesh tones. At the centre of the eight similar portraits, is a figure of Arjuna, one of the Pandavas and a mighty warrior. By caste Arjuna is meant to be a Brahmin but due to the custom, actors and performers are usually Dalits the untouchable class whose lives are wrought with discrimination while they struggle against social taboos. The paradox is that in most plays in Orissa, the role of Arjuna is essayed by a Dalit actor, and this paradox speaks of society’s hypocrisy.

The other canvas is a sea of faces, of heroes from Bollywood, the Indian film industry and dream machine. The stigma of acting is no longer operational in the urban film industry and many of these actors are high caste Brahmins. In the centre of these poster boys, is a dog with many arrows in its mouth. This, another mythological reference from the Mahabharata, is of the dog shot by Ekalavya, who was a tribal, low caste, but an undefeatable marksman with the bow and arrow.

Ekalavya made Dronacharya his guru (teacher) and became famous after this feat. However Dronnacharya, who wanted Arjuna the high caste Brahmin to be the best marksman with no competition, asked for Ekalavya’s thumb for his gurudakshana (teacher’s fee).
With this tragic tale, Panda laces his canvas with the bitter irony of life.

 

Vinod Patel:
 

This artist is a sculptor, which is no wonder that even his paintings have use world famous sculptures as icons that tell a tale of forgotten glories.

Having trained at Baroda and Orissa, Patel instills in his canvases the texture of weathered rock, and ancient history, both canvases are rendered with a textured almost photographic quality. In these works, Patel has featured the stone heads of Rapa Nui the ancient statues of Easter Island Polynesia.

This island was colonized and its resources pilfered until its ecosystem collapsed. The Mo’ai, as the statues are referred, is monumental sculptures of ancestor spirits that the Rapas worshipped.    

By recalling the past, Patel has invoked a loaded metaphor, one which refers to the greed of capitalism and the destruction of indigenous culture.

In his other canvas, there is an ancient statue from Bali that the artist digs out from shadowy caves, forgotten in the past.

While conservation teams are now beginning to value the past with efforts to rescue these relics from the brink of ‘extinction’ too many years have slipped by before it was salvaged. Patel grew up in Rourkela the city of steel mills and junk yards in Orissa, and has always had a penchant for forgotten and discarded things. He has always preferred objects over actual people in his canvases, drawing attention to seemingly inconsequential.