Samita Nag’s exhibition of graphic works — etchings, lithographs, drypoints — at Chitrakoot Art Gallery (June 8-14) included prints of exceptional precision and technical excellence. The selection of works is wide — from the late Nineties up to the present — and charts the evolution of Nag’s sensibility and working method.

Nag comes out of the distinguished Bengal School of printmaking that took off from Santiniketan under grand old masters like Nandalal Bose and Ramkinkar Baij. Her early works are influenced by the charming rusticity of rural Bengal — its flora and fauna, bauls and peasants, the smell and tint of earth. The modestly-sized shalukh looks like a mirage: observed closely, it transforms into a grasshopper, or perhaps into one of the three shalikhs quarrelling on the roof of the kitchen in the rhyme from Tagore’s Shahaj Path. There are direct references to Tagore in Krishnakali and Andhargharer Raja (alluding to Raktakarabi). In the former, a menacing arc of ghano kalo megh looms over one corner, capturing the ineffable melancholy that rings through the song. The king of the dark chamber is set aglow by a sepia tint, reminiscent of Ganesh Pyne’s classic works in tempera. Village of my love is a subtle exploration of perspective through a modulation of texture and tone.

The most arresting images in this show are of recent origin. These are mostly etchings based on the life of the Buddha, exquisitely detailed and resonant. The series of four etchings, Akshaybat, shows the immortal banyan tree billowing like a huge mushroom cloud in the gathering dusk. Dry leaves are scattered in the breeze, suggested by the interplay of light and shade. The tree reappears in the Mahaparinirvan I, which shows the supine Buddha in a hollow, as if being interred alive. Draped like a mummy, he has become one with the yellow-ochre soil (top right). A line of white elephants, a familiar Buddhist motif, appears in A past that passed, while Buddha by the Niranjana river seems to be contained in a blue womb.

At an obvious level, these are art-historically conscious exercises in style and technique, manipulating height, distance and proportion. But they are also intense moments of being — when myths give rise to self-knowledge, facts meld with fiction, and the “past that passed” is realized in the apprehension of the present. Such moments are the fruit of an abiding curiosity — the sort that prompted the urgent questions in the opening of Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn”.

Samita Nag’s most fascinating work (based on the cave-paintings of Bhimbhetka in Madhya Pradesh) takes off from one of the fundamental impulses of art — to comprehend, in Keats’s words, the meaning of the past’s “silence” and then to register the rhythm of “slow time”. The fading battle scenes, hunts and the bison with a snake (top left) hark back to a past that is preserved, not in words, but as images. The silence of these images is therefore literal, as they come out of a prehistoric time embodied by the caves, when meaning resided in pure form.

Susmit Biswas has chosen a rather odd title for his exhibition, If you look you may not leap (Akar Prakar, June 7-17). Sadly, a catchy phrase isn’t good enough to cover up the fact that his ‘recent’ work has not changed much from what he showed a few years ago at the same gallery. The squiggles and blotches in this show (bottom) exactly replicate his earlier work.

Presumably, Biswas is influenced by the high-modernist exuberance that found its darkest expression in Jackson Pollock’s “action painting”. The wild brushwork — spattering yellow, red and green on monochromatic backgrounds — leaves a trail of charged figures darting by like electric flashes. Some of these stick-like creatures appear to be rehearsing ballet steps, while others stand brooding, like columns of pure colour. They might be holding a fish or an orange ball like a drop of sun. There is really nothing more than a surface cleverness, which seems to have pushed Biswas’s creativity to a dead end.