C. Douglas has chosen a deceptively banal title for the complex body of work he is showing at Gallery Akar Prakar (Missed Call, till November 10). These mixed media images make up a complete series, a surreally haunting meditation on binaries — man-machine, body-mind, silence-speech, presence-absence. These dualities, though ostensibly made up of opposites, are revealed to be essentially intertwined, existing in a time-space continuum. The phrase, “missed call”, ubiquitously inscribed on the images, acts almost like a spell, while telephone numbers rise out of, and dissolve into, the murky backgrounds like cryptic messages.

The appeal of this series lies in what is suggested, rather than directly offered, to the eye. A firm departure from the fetal creatures that once preoccupied Douglas, these visually arresting images are riddled with a sense of fragility that is palpable as much in the disintegrating human bodies as in the intermingling textures and tones. Acrylic is applied in intense patches, then allowed to dissolve into the feeble pencil marks on paper awashed in dull water colour. Inky blues, the gentle aura of fading sunlight and icy-cold greys flow in and out of the pictures like major and minor notes in a musical composition. Douglas also uses scale with deliberation, sometimes compressing a world of feelings into claustrophobic spaces (5.75”x7.75”), and, at other times, delving into a theatre of the bizarre on larger formats (30”x22” and 40”x30”).

Douglas teases out several layers of meaning from the phrase ‘missed call’, from its most obvious association with mobile phones to its sociological significance as a popular jargon. Colloquially, a missed call, rather than referring to the absence of communication, may act as a code, a response cutting across a range of emotions. A seemingly inconsequential thing like a missed call has the power to put the maker and the recipient of the call in a peculiar hierarchy of desire, expectations and reciprocation. The response to such a call, or the lack of it, has another set of repercussions, from pure delight to profound abjection. Written on the robotic faces and the fragmented torsos, suspended in a void or entangled in wires, are feelings of dejection, apprehension, fatigue, irritation and endless wait.

Rarely does the shadow of happiness cross these body-parts, falling through the emptiness like leaves in winter. A solitary figure climbs up a ladder, then bursts into a jumble of hands and legs before disappearing inside a severed head in Missed Call 5. This diptych-like composition, split by the bluish-grey shadows on the left and a coating of pale orange on the right, is filled with a wintry sadness (picture). The lingering thread of despair harks back to the dystopic mindscapes of K.C.S. Panikar and Anselm Kiefer, the two most notable influences on Douglas.

The reach of this sequence goes beyond the visual, plunging into the realms of sound, or rather into the absence of it. In every image, an old-fashioned bakelite phone, broken or dangling by its cord, appears insistently. One wonders if the tortured faces, scarred hands and contorted lips are desperate to escape the ringing cry of the phone or anxiously waiting for a call. Douglas’ dream-world shuts out all answers, and yet, like Munch’s Scream, trembles with a suppressed babble of voices. Into the deafening silence of colours — the dirty blues and chilling whites — this mad din is condensed, dissipated and absorbed.