Glimpses of Bengali art

ALMOST ONE hundred works of art by 26 artists from Artsacre - and artists' village situated a couple of hundred miles from Calcutta in the verdant 24 Parganas of West Bengal overflow the top floor of Apparao Galleries and come down to Portfolio, ground floor, and become a visual experience for the art lovers of Chennai. Artsacre is a centre of contemporary Bengal art that was set up in 1984 by Shuvaprasanna Bhattacharya, an art teacher, to inspire a breed of young painters. Though he does not live and work there any more, his companions and students have gone ahead, both individually and collectively, to explore the art of neo-Bengal school.

Artsacre has been the centre of controversies and shattered dreams, but overriding all these have been the faith and confidence of the creative individuals who have put behind them the trends of separatism and isolation and grown into a commune through mutual understanding and sharing of responsibility. It takes time to reach a cherished goal - the healthy atmosphere for creativity and the opportunity to exude human expression of fellow-feeling - which Artsacre maintains as its main objective.

This art centre began with the patronage of people like Satyajit Ray, film-maker. German author Gunter Grass, Pandit Ravi Shankar, Mrinal Sen and Chintamani Kar, to mention a few among many, and very promising artists are staying together in Artsacre today building a meaningful art-enriched life and also forging ahead with bright prospects of laying down their own creative path.

One positive approach of these artists has been not to build a school or a movement arond them. They are concerned with their inner expressions born out of the compulsion to play with colour, line, fantasies and forms. They work over their discoveries, setting aside all tenets of tradition and academic pretensions, as a result of which the works, dictated by the demands of theme and its intensity, reveal a spirit of visual involvement. Among the exhibited artists are Shyam Kanu Borthakur, Biswajit Saha, Apto Bhattacharya, Swati Mukherjee, Jaspal Singh, Samir Roy, Bibek Pal, Parthapratim Saha and Sakthi Karmakar. The invisible screen of the commonplace is removed from all of them and all the artists and their ultimate significance intensify in the mind.

Biswajit Saha (the Secretary of Artsacre) who has exhibited widely in and outside Artsacre, works in a world of fantasy and his creations transport us into an unknown era through sheer feeling. His work is neither a page taken out of a prevalent myth nor out of an epic - nevertheless his brush goes out for a two- dimensional composition featuring Indian miniatures as well as vertically present Egyptian figures. His works reveal passionate forms and textures drawn from tribal sculpture.

Angry, bold brushwork is the hallmark of Shyam Kanu Borthakur which has a savage flavour. Despite having worked for quite sometime with artists outside Assam, the Assamese ethos still prevails and recently, he has been depicting powerful and charged images of wild animals entitled "Beasts". He has already reserved a place for himself in the world of art as a painter of wild life. He has a clear weakness for thick pigments and a peculiar wild green, earth-red and burnt amber, which lend a meaningful depth to his works.

Jaspal Singh's works in watercolours are vibrant and his long experimentation with human shapes and cityscapes has led to a stage where one can easily identify his work. Samir Roy's works are highly experimental and he uses and exploits the bases of handmade board, tearing and scratching the surface to create intricate textures with liquid water colours and ink. He bends and twists the work to attain an aesthetic level which brings about an overall abstraction. Bibek Pal and Parthapratim - both are involved in presenting cityscapes but in different mediums - the first in charcoal and ink and the other in mixed media as well as oils.

Apto Bhattacharya's works take us back to a lost, familiar world - palace ruins or the inner courtyards of a colonial structure - but he creates a strange atmosphere with an uncanny throw of light and the use of yellow, burnt amber and olive green along with a faint blue. In her paintings. Swati Mukherjee transforms the subjects and situations into symbolism - mainly landscapes where the luminous quality of the light spectrum is distributed in various colour layers. This luminosity is amazing - steady, profound, resonant and meaningful. Sakthi Karmakar draws simple people whose lifestyle is in unison with nature. Oils and pastels are his medium, and if the notion of civilisation is modernity, then Karmakar stands by an eternal simple life where everything is governed by the laws of nature.

The message of Artsacre has spread beyond India and artists from different parts of the world have come here for a visit, stay and participate in workshops. In turn artists from Artsacre have visited and exhibited their worksin foreign countries, but their vision remain focussed on Artscare, their own special conserve, situated as they say "between the earth and the sky".

The exhibition is on till September 15.

ANJALI SIRCAR

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