With 57 works from 41 artists, CIMA’s summer show, on till August 14, ensures something for every taste.

To begin with tribal imagery and its exuberant formalism. From this redoubtable tradition come Bhuribai and Mayank Kumar Shyam of Madhya Pradesh who’ve been evolving in contact with mainstream art, for both seem very comfortable using acrylic and canvas. Indeed, Bhuribai’s 175cmx235cm work demonstrates her ease with the material. The pictorial space remains 2-D as lively motifs of horses and people are distributed all over with no nod to logical perspective and scale. As fetching is Shyam’s quaint stylization in Mata Kachhua.

Among the city artists, you notice Satyajit Roy whose wit is suited to, what seems to be, political satire. Two brilliant-red macaws morph into shiny boxing gloves as they have a beak-to-beak confrontation. The duel, tellingly, is physical, referring to the violence all around. The other work takes conflict to its dénouement in wishing for the destruction of evil by good in terms of the myth of Prahlad and Hiranyakashipu, the demon king punished by Vishnu as Narasimha avatar. However, as cheeky neutrality gives way to the naïve idealism of partisanship, quizzical ambiguity gives way to too simplistic a message. Sumitro Basak’s debunking banter, on the other hand, pricks the vanity and social pretensions of the upwardly mobile seen as caricature crows in borrowed finery.

Sougata Das seems to have come upon an effective medium in recent months: mirror etching. The mirror offers a manipulative surface, reflecting not just the artist’s etched figures to the viewer, but also the viewer and his surroundings to himself. Thus it draws the unsuspecting viewer into the work as a participant. By default. A wry take on the conceit of self/social reflection in art, and that yields an inversion of meaning. The figures are behind bars looking out, but the viewer cannot remain an outsider looking in because the distance between image and reality is erased and both come to exist on the same plane to suggest that everybody is behind metaphorical bars. The rectilinear lines — perhaps, in part, a result of surface resistance to the etching tool — echo the style of Tagore in their sharp angles and tense scratching.

Shreyasi Chatterjee’s work—a thoughtful mix of cloth, appliqué, thread, paint and pen (ink) — lays out in vertical space a montage of brief images in passing, as it were: idols, temples, clothes lines, hovels, autorickshaws and so on. Unlinked, but forming the kind of composite scenery train windows reveal. Its breakdown of form into geometric pieces of cloth, which are then synthesized with staccato stitches and sketched lines, lends it a chatty, colourful colloquialism.

The small drawings of Jogen Chowdhury and the charcoal landscapes of Paramjit Singh are not to be missed either.

Subroto Kundu’s semi-abstract work suggests a disquietingly bereft landscape. The palette is almost monochromatic in its variation of turquoise shades. The only other colours are black, in patches, that rise vertically like the slender, burnt-out trunks of conifers after a hillside blaze; and a web of fine, nervy, beige lines descending to the bottom of the canvas. And Chitravanu Majumdar’s sophisticated compositional grammar is reiterated in his zone of dark colours with neat letters hanging in mid-air in the manner of the stencilled letters of Braque. But the insertion of a rather sentimentalized image appears as an afterthought of concession to figuration.

Of the abstractionists, Kingshuk Sarkar wrests the viewer’s attention with the rambunctious energy of his works. The splash of the acrylic on the canvases, dark and sulphurous, its pimpled scatter and its dripping trails, increasingly suggest action painting. Asim Pal’s print of red fireballs flinging about explosions of dark-brown colours is noticeable too. While Akhilesh’s vertical divisions of space act as a foil to the flow of a spontaneous line charged with little biomorphic hints, Mona Rai’s horizontal canvas is a tautly balanced work.

Tapas Biswas takes on something of an arduous technical dare in his 127cmx104.1cmx 81.3 cm bronze tableau. Along a framework of poles that functions as a stable axis from where sprout lily pads, there swarms a network of small, wiry human figures holding hands, engaged in a vertiginous communal celebration. The lithe forms seem to dance and fly like acrobats and gliders, palpably stretching out to reach each other, suspended in space. The heady yearning for interconnected togetherness is made clearer by the title: Had It Been So. The other sculptors include Sarbari Roy Chowdhury, Niranjan Pradhan and Bimal Kundu.