Severe, sharp and startling, Samir Aich’s latest exhibition at CIMA gallery brings together a body of work that is at once serene and scary. The tireless experimenter that Aich is, this collection, on display till February 6, has been justifiably called Nomadic Detours. It represents yet another turn in the artist’s restless peregrinations in search of the perfect form for that most formless of things — feelings.

For some time now, having tried and tested both figurative and abstract painting, Aich has wisely eluded both categories, choosing instead to lose himself in the middle path — leading into the realm of pure emotions. So a fierce, teeth-baring cat with a dead fish sprawled before it surpasses its mere cat-like quality as it evokes traces of terror, anger, pain, grief, even glee. The fantastical creatures in Aich’s spooky world become agents of a primal fear. These deformed figures arouse strange feelings of doom and dread as the mythical sandman did in little Nathaniel in E.T.A. Hoffman’s story, on which Freud later based his famous discussion of the uncanny.

In the contorted, serpentine figures that Aich creates against fields of intense red, black or green, there is a still beauty belied by their disturbingly asymmetric shapes. Baring their teeth in agony, ecstasy or anger, as they writhe along a spotless expanse of colour, these are distinctly uncanny creatures. As in Freud’s understanding of the German word, Unheimlich, they are profoundly “unhomely”, ill at ease in the world they inhabit — which is the human mind — and enslaved by the pleasures and pains of bodily feelings.

It is as if the body conjures up these fragments and phantoms in dreams and moments of dull wakefulness: a beady-eyed monster of a spider, a barn owl staring back fixedly, a distant, half-remembered blouse coming alive in a purple, psychedelic haze. Some of these images are trailed by tiny dots, as if stars from afar are coming together to form a sublime constellation; in others, the paint is allowed to congeal in impasto to give the impression of relief. Lines, crosses, grids become the interface between the viewer and this new dimension of slow pain and endless suffering. Tears, wounds and stitches, the sudden eruption of lurid red or the slow trickle of pink against a grim background — every tiny detail articulates unspoken tales of violence.

There is also a touching innocence, especially in the exquisite work done on paper and in small format. Several of these are no better than doodles, dabbed over with tea liquor, and fortified by vigorous strokes of crayons or dry pastel. Yet, they are almost always capable of arresting the eye with some fine detail. Like children looking for elephants in the clouds, one is tempted to seek out secret patterns left behind by smoke curling out of a kettle.

Then there are the vestiges of love as well, but twisted beyond recognition, as in the twin images of the Taj Mahal. Scarred and sinuous, the monument seems to be refracted in water, its edges tremulous and dissolving. Other iconic images turn up fleetingly: the fish-eating cat of early Bengal patachitra, big fish eating small fish in Breughel’s famous work, and the comical yet cruel animals from the topsy-turvy world of Sukumar Ray’s Abol Tabol or Rabindranath Tagore’s Shey. There are hints of the stricken, skeletal forms associated with Somnath Hore, and a generous presence of that luminous line invented by Jogen Chowdhury to create those ethereal figures in his signature style. Aich draws on a richly complicated tradition to arrive at an idiom that is a blend of the real and the surreal, indigenous and European influences.

However, Aich’s visual language, though crafted with deliberation and expertise, is not unique. Quite a few of his contemporaries, notably Samir Roy and Jaya Ganguly, have already ventured into this uncertain terrain — where it becomes difficult to tell living, dreaming and dying apart. Originating with the Surrealists, this habit of daring the limits of the possible became closely identified with great modernists like Picasso, Dali and Bacon. And it is the memory of latter that remains most vivid in the way Aich depicts the transformation of the human into the subhuman.