A painting by Tapati Chowdhury at Ganges Art Gallery; (above) a work by Prabir Sen

Eleven artists, mostly from Calcutta and Delhi, and one from Bangladesh (Mahbubur Rahman), are being featured in Ganges Art Gallery’s current exhibition titled Constructing the Present.

Having seen it one wonders why it was named so. For this is no better or worse than any other group show, and one would be looking in vain for a unifying agenda.

Most of the works are paintings on canvas, and while there is nothing wrong with the medium, the works themselves neither break any new ground nor float any new ideas. So one should view them as objectively as possible forgetting the purported context of globalisation.

There are some artists, however, whose work could catch the viewer’s eye. Tapati Chowdhury is one of them. Hers is a figure of an old Bengali woman, a storyteller, with her legs outstretched. The background is black with the wispy figure almost as insubstantial as smoke itself.

Her second work with its coagulated cloud over the remnants of a tree trunk, however, is commonplace.

Tanmoy Samanta’s works are actually small drawings of objects with the minimum of subdued tones — grey, green, blue. But these are not realistic drawings. There is always a touch of fantasy in them although they are based on real things and this makes them more intriguing than still life.

Deepak Tandon is based in Delhi, and though he is an autodidact he shows consummate skill in creating non-figurative works that resemble fabric dyed with either coffee or tea. The overall effect is pretty calm but beyond that there is not much to write home about, not about this exhibition either.

For Mahbubur Rahman is dull and prosaic, S. Gopinath’s assemblages have been done to death, and beyond the surface glitter of Jehangir Jani’s hybrid heads there is only metallic foil.

Prabir Sen is best known as an illustrator and publisher responsible for bringing out unique books in Bengali printed in letterpress.

Over the past few years he has produced several bodies of paintings and drawing which he has exhibited from time to time.

His exhibition at Weavers’ Studio titled Different Face is a series of faces defined with black lines that seem to have an independent life of their own. So while these are definitely faces, these are faces that morph from one frame to the other, sometimes comical, sometimes sinister, sometimes serpentine, sometimes patua-style, sometimes goggle-eyed like Homer J. Simpson but more often than not with an element of surprise.

When one takes a close look at these drawings one notices that flights of Prabir Sen’s fancy these may be, but he wields his brush with a sure and unfaltering hand. That needs technical finesse.