Two of Aditya Basak’s works being displayed till Tuesday at Akar Prakar gallery

Behind every civilisation is a story of bloody strife, war and destruction. Aditya Basak’s latest crop of paintings is a contemplation of this devastating truth and man’s over-weaning pride epitomised in the mythical figure of Icarus. These are very large mixed-media works on board that are being displayed at Akar Prakar gallery till Tuesday and will be exhibited at a later date in Delhi.

The works are dominated by the huge heads of deities with inscrutable expressions that people the temple complex of Angkor Vat in Cambodia. They have fleshy mouths that accentuate their arrogance, bordering on cruelty, quite akin to pre-Columbian sculpture of South America. The cruel hands of time have left their mark on these crumbling, striated forms.

The mouth of a heavenly beauty is pierced with a small metal spike in the fashion of religious fanatics. A graceful ibex — so common in ancient Persian art — leaps across a mass of shadowy figures wielding spears. Physical beauty is no guarantee against violence.

As in most of Basak’s recent works, these heads are bathed in a lambent light that reveals the painstaking care with which Basak cross-hatches the surface of his works. Tiny war planes like gnats symbolic of the atrocities that these geographical regions have witnessed in the past, fly past the heads.

However, the real story is told by the dark, gory backdrop of these works. Basak uses black, midnight blue and dark red that looks like clotted blood suggestive of genocide. He uses layers upon layers of pigment to create this effect of coagulation. Acrylic, tempera, watercolour, charcoal — he has used them all. The heads with their eyes shut tight seem to be indifferent to the pain.

Basak’s best work, however, is beyond manifestations of physical beauty. Here he uses simple but double-edged forms that have an ambiguity about them. No place for certainties here.

A lean man with a care-worn face struggles with a dead weight on his back. But this burden that bears him down could also be his wings that cannot defy the gravitational pull.

The best work in this exhibition is an apocalyptic vision of what is perhaps the war to end all wars. The surface is covered with dark, blood-red clouds. A planet floats through the haze. A large head with somewhat distorted features appears in this miasma. It is a cataclysmic image that is also undeniably beautiful. This is perhaps the irony of all great civilisations. Everything boils down to death and destruction.