Young artists have increasingly stepped away from established isms to embrace new practices and stake out uncharted territory. Like the seven who showed work involving paper at Artsacre recently; work that doesn’t use paper as a mute surface but gets Inside the Fibre to engage in a partnership with it, exploring its diversity, its tactile richness, its plastic possibilities.
The first example is provided by Kalpana Vishwas, presenting disarmingly simple imagery that’s complex in its references. Her paintings of delicate, withered, moth-eaten leaves of varying textures, imprinted with a maze of minute veins knit, as it were, into aerial views of topography, posit a succinct metaphor for monstrous growth inimical to environmental health. Fixed to glass sheets, their shadows lend them an illusory thickness in a few cases, while little blobs of paint in one work suggest corrosive toxin droplets.
Ruma Choudhury romances the medium and turns it into the message: the paper and colour that she herself makes become a sentient material of disturbing implications as she articulates subtle inflections in it. Rough, beige terrains with charred zones, wrinkles and a litter of fragments conspire to invoke arid wastelands in which may lie fossil remains from some natural calamity of long ago or a warning of one that’s imminent. That’s what Ghanashyam Latua’s Excoriated Land insinuates, as well. Scarred by tears and pimples, the denuded land could have been sculpted by the weather, so to speak, and is a forbidding desert, hostile to any kind of life.
Fragile forms appear to stream across the consciousness of Promiti Hussain, as she examines a woman’s relationship with her intimate space. Mrinmoyee Deb cuts pits into paper to recall geological strata as a correlative to memories congealed in layers over time. Memory is a motif in Arpita Akhand, too, but as part of her assertion of identity chequered by deletions and insertions induced by social compulsions. The way maps, history, personal narratives were wracked by incisions and impositions in the context of Partition, for example. Finally, there was Kaushik Halder, whose clever crafting of papier mâché, sometimes around a metal armature, redeems everyday objects as lively, sculpturesque expressions.
