When activists in European museums throw soup, oil and ink on paintings, they are trying to drag human attention away from art and towards the grim realities of life. But what if art itself could force viewers to reckon with the dingy margins that often go overlooked? Prasanta Sahu’s artworks, exhibited at The Geometry of Ordinary Lives (Emami Art), did exactly this by mapping the lived experiences of those who exist on the margins of our consciousness and, yet, are elementary to everything that keeps a city and its people moving. The engineer-turned-artist conjured up a unique vocabulary that blended the clinical precision of science and the empathy of art in pieces like Between the Earth and Space and Sitting Man in an Ancient Landscape where working-class bodies were mapped with all the burdens they bear along with the tools of their trade. It felt almost wrong to romanticise the pale, delicate blue washes that he used for the skies given that it ruthlessly exposed those labouring under it.
In a cartographic work, Mapping my Neighbourhood (picture, left), Sahu transformed the everyday haunts of his neighbours — vendors, people arguing on a bench, others getting tea, somnolent cows — into landmarks around which the neighbourhood is mapped. None of these signposts is permanent; yet they are more fixed than permanent geographical markers. There is something quite poetic about the way Sahu employs colours — the dreamlike washes of ink and acrylic form the perfect juxtaposition for the stark, black lines that chart the inner lives of people — from blacksmiths to potters and masons to moiras.
While Sahu’s approach to bodies was spartan, featured alongside him in a concurrent show, Re: Figuring, were artists who explored the human figure in all its glorious details, in a variety of environments, and under a myriad circumstances. Avishek Das’s sculptures, for instance, were lithe figures caught in everyday activities like bathing and bearing weight. Be it in bronze or fibreglass, Das’s nude figurines were languid, their muscles not well-defined like Roman sculptures but familiar from the streets and places around us. In Janhavi Khemka’s texturally intricate woodcut — she plays with patterns to add depth — a woman is slowly being reclaimed by nature even while the bonds of mundane domesticity try to hold on to her.
The figure in Kushan Bhattacharya’s The Cold River was engulfed by the magnificent surroundings — reminiscent of a Roerich painting — of exquisitely detailed mountains and a river that could be studied for hours for the nuances of light and shade caught by each minute line. His Aranyaka Pages was full of mystery and fantastic creatures made from watercolour so finely executed that no AI would be able to imitate its tonal depths. Priti Roy’s tempera explored the figures of women, both mortal and immortal, and how they are bound by caregiving and the idea of never quite belonging to a home. Ghar? was a poignant portrayal of a woman leaving for her marital home and looking back at the home where she grew up, but which was never really her own, and all the memories she was leaving behind.
Sayanee Sarkar’s abstract expressionist figuration resisted easy attribution. Like Mary Abbott, her exuberant compositions of overlapping and gradating expanses of colour were lavish in their structure. Santanu Debnath’s watercolours observed figures and their natural surroundings with the detailed eye of a miniaturist, albeit with the artist being ever-present as an observer, much in the style of the Common Man cartoons. Swastik Pal’s photographs of the people of Sundarbans captured the figures that inhabit the heart of darkness, communicating the dangers of the forest by playing up the shadows. Tapas Biswas’s sculptures explored the often indistinguishable figures of those who toil in factories and on the field, set to function in synchronicity like the cogs in a wheel. Ushnish Mukhopadhyay’s series was a sensitive exploration of the body that has too much time to study itself amidst deafening loneliness — he
shone in pastel, especially Untitled IX (picture, right). Bholanath Rudra’s otherworldly figures were trapped in a seemingly extra-terrestrial world lit by a faint, eerie glow, portending a desolate future for humans seeking to colonise Mars.