The title of Samir Roy’s exhibition of recent works, Quaint Gaze (Gallery Akar Prakar, Feb 16-29), invokes a visual register that is at once direct and richly difficult. Quaint is a semantically layered word. The OED explains it as, “attractively unusual or old-fashioned”, and traces its etymology to Middle English, when it meant “clever” or “ingenious”. All these senses cohere in Roy’s works.

At the purely visual level, the appeal of Roy’s works is strikingly direct, and curiously disquieting as well. An array of leaden eyes stares out, fixing the viewers with their unwavering gaze: blank, stricken, glazed, steady. There is a shift of attention from the subject to the object of art, leading to an ironic reversal of fate. The viewers are no longer just the consumers of art, but are — unwittingly and despite themselves — consumed by the images they look at.

The ‘quaint gaze’ comes from the figures on the canvas, but it is also demanded of the viewers. The former, in fact, is intended to complicate the latter. In this sense, the quaint gaze is double-edged, refracted through the twin activities of ‘looking at’ and ‘being looked at’. These activities are not simple polarities either, but complement each other. The sense of madness, pity and fear that comes out of Roy’s works is sustained by, and best experienced in, this exchange of gazes.

Doubleness is also structurally and thematically intrinsic to this exhibition. Quaint Gaze begins with a series of arresting ink-and-charcoal drawings, followed by works in mixed media. Some of the black-and-white images are later painted anew in colour, specific motifs are sporadically revived or alluded to. Their arrivals and departures are posed as challenges to the memory. Viewers have to remain severely attentive in order to grasp the thread of this memory game.

Serendipity is the rare privilege offered by these images. The narrative thread, if any, is tenuous. There are visions and recognitions, the overarching idea is suddenly glimpsed, but remains as elusive as the will-o’-the-wisp. Roy’s abiding interest is in the grotesque; he refers eclectically to the Old Masters: Grünewald’s monsters, Dürer’s malcontents, the gargoyles of baroque architecture, even the shape-shifting beasts of Sukumar Ray’s Abol-Tabol and the fantastical creatures of Rabindranath Tagore’s Shey. With this barely perceptible nod to tradition, Roy plunges into primeval darkness. Out of this void, he forges amorphous beings — man, animal and machine all at once. These distended figures, faces resembling horrific death-masks, sometimes appear to be suspended in formaldehyde, and sometimes trailing slime, saliva and bubbles (picture).

This celebration of a visceral interiority, reminiscent of Jaya Ganguly’s figures, goes beyond mere spectacle. In Light and myself or Sadhu with pet, the non-human leaps out of the human like a parasite, each gazing at the other with doleful eyes. The animate is corrupted by the inanimate. The feasting birds, suckling vermin and fluid human bodies are impaled by wheels and pedals. (The sickly grin on their faces appears even more nightmarish than Gregor Samsa’s metamorphosis in Kafka’s story.) Painted in sharp, angular strokes, these are perfectly composed images, diligently based on principles of symmetry, and alluding to the frescoes of Benodebehari Mukherjee or Ramananda Bandopadhyay. But contrary to the perfection of the conventionally beautiful, Roy self-consciously relies on an aesthetics of imperfection.

The imperfection is as much in the form as in the content. In the works using mixed media, Roy brings the full physical force of his skills. He uses the palette knife to wrench out this creatural world, scratching and tearing at the surface of the canvas, leaving it scarred and harrowed. The canvas appears to be lit from behind, but the effect gets lost behind the glass with which these images have been framed.

At the heart of Roy’s creativity is this anguish, a restless reaching beyond the bounds of stability into the realm of the unknowable. Man, beast and machine, separated by vast unbridgeable distances, struggle to come together as an undifferentiated whole. This desire to bring the uncanny into the natural world, to add strangeness to beauty and breathe life into abstraction is common to every artistic enterprise.

“Ugly wooden eyes, why do you stare so?” Geppetto had asked of Pinocchio, who had grown out of a piece of wood. The faces in Roy’s works, quaintly gazing out, also inspire a similar question — as much from the viewers as from their bemused creator. Only these are eyes that are not so much wooden as they are leaden.