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Jagat Janani 1
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When one received the invitation of Fuxnama: Recent Works by Sumitro Basak, to be exhibited at the CIMA gallery from March 15 to April 20, one wondered if the title had something to do with the familiar, four-letter taboo word, the much-mouthed expletive, which is still considered unprintable at a time when bikini-line waxing has turned into a topic of serious discussion in many English language dailies published in India. So one was initially disappointed on being deprived of a bonking bonanza when one discovered that the word “Fux” is only a fictitious brand name coined by the young artist himself to rhyme with the actual label of a line of undies (one should check out the fascinating and sometime sick-making entries on this word in the Urban Dictionary). The ubiquitous billboards, posters, and electronic and print media advertisements, big and small, of this label cannot be missed. Glad to say that the show turned out to be a lot more than mere wordplay.
Ever since Andy Warhol hit upon the brilliant idea of creating — or shall we say, manufacturing? — his famous 32 Campbell’s Soup Cans series of silk-screen prints in 1962, artists have not stopped replicating the idea of representing the modern era of commercialization and indiscriminate ‘sameness’ in some way or the other. Undies proliferate in Basak’s canvases. But Basak is no Warhol clone. He wants to hold a mirror to our fast-changing times, and it is the narrative that matters in his art. To quote the artist: “Story telling is maybe my art practice, my actual medium, but I also like to draw, I like the visual.”
Basak is a frequent traveller on the suburban railway lines and is familiar with the high-pitched kitschy culture peculiar to district towns that many city slickers, and gallery habitués in particular, may not be familiar with. This often vulgar, raucous and raunchy expression of contemporary suburban culture finds a friend in Basak, who has made ample use of it in these paintings with their bright, often jarring shades reminiscent of blinding colours in rustic signboards. He has not left out the cacophonous accompaniments to bucolic song-and-dance routines either. One can hear this rough music in his short video.
Basak pulls out all stops when it comes to scatology and smut. One should look out for the details in the larger picture — the sex kittens, the woman with pneumatic breasts, the dead husband in undies, people caught in the act of relieving themselves, and the banana flower, which could aptly illustrate the Urban Dictionary entry on banana hammock. It is only Basak’s sense of graphic design that holds these contrary elements together.
That Basak is taken up with story-telling is quite apparent from the extensive use of train lines in his images that loop across his canvases like a yarn he is weaving. He brings a wide variety of elements into his large paintings that resemble a sprawling jigsaw puzzle usually dominated by a huge figure — more often than not a giant bird drawn from the great Hindu epics and legends — from the “Dharma Baka Upakshyan” of the Mahabharat to the Jatayu episode in the Ramayan — in which outsized mythical fowl abound. In Basak’s paintings, they hold the branded undies in their humongous beaks perched on a city skyline, which is a random mix of many Indian metros, with the Taj Mahal, real or virtual, thrown in for added measure. Perhaps Basak had in mind The Dictionary of Imaginary Places.
Basak, the CIMA handout says, is a voracious reader and his favourites include Kaliprasanna Sinha, Subimal Misra, Nabarun Bhattacharya, Alberto Manguel, Umberto Eco and Orhan Pamuk. Not only is Basak quite with it as a reader, as an artist too he is trendy, quoting as he does the most visible manifestations of mofussil culture and Japanese Manga comics and Tokyo’s cultural underworld of the 1960s. Quite predictably, he has appropriated Kalighat patas (think of the lobsters in langotas) and has turned into an image one of the best-known creations of today’s Bengali literature — Nabarun Bhattacharya’s fyataru, the winged terror, who has, willy-nilly, become an icon. Of course, Basak does not probe Calcutta’s underbelly as Bhattacharya did in his celebrated novels and short stories. And perhaps that was not in his scheme of things either. To quote Warhol: “If you want to know all about Andy Warhol, just look at the surface of my paintings and films and me, and there I am. There’s nothing behind it.” Only the skin matters.
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