Buddha 3, a painting by Anasuya Mukherjee

Anasuya Mukherjee’s paintings ‘Reaching for the Buddha’ at the Kolkata International Centre for Arts, Literature and Culture are rather intriguing. The gestalt ? sum total of the structures and inherent patterns ? makes a strong visual impression at first. She has reduced Bu-ddhist iconography, developed during the Kushana and Gupta periods, to bare minimum.

Most of the works, except for Buddha 1, are done in miniature formats. In Buddha 1, the god is seen seating like a yogi with his attendant Bodhisatta beside and a half-human-half-animal figure below. Executed by significant forms, there is no compositional cohesiveness among the godly and satanic figures.

Mukherjee throws away the meaningful symbols and replaces them with certain motifs. In the small works she places them in and around the contour of Buddha’s face. Buddha 2 has a number of eyes within and outside the face, along with the insertions of two horizontal and vertical hose-pipe-like shapes.

In the other exhibits, the god’s face is covered by mehendi-designed hands. One face has two pictorial insets, the top one with a cloud and the bottom one with a plane in flight, probably suggesting a hijacking or 9/11.

Mukherjee plays with colours delightfully, melding them to create a near-perfect unification of surface textures. But a lack of draughtsmanship stands in the way of achieving a magic spell of the mixture.

In 1960, some Indian artists were taken in by abstract expressionism. The enchantment, however, did not last long. Nevertheless, Prafulla Dahanukar’s paintings still betray that love. Her paintings have the effect of an interior decor, giving an air-conditioned, feel-good and pollution-free ambience. But repetitive visuals create a monotony.

Dahanukar’s oils exhibited in Gallery88 belong to a series. The monotony of flat backgrounds, which have subtle variations of hues, is broken up by a horizontal spread of ruggedness. The almost silky texture contrasts well with parallel paints. She seems to have used rollers to put layers of paints and applied one major colour with some other hues. This is done to get the silky feel.

In other works the rough texture of the surface looks like we-ather-beaten pebbles. The similarity to nature raises the question of whether the paintings are abstract or seemingly so. They are non-figurative, but not quite as abstract as they seem.