A painting by Sk. Sahazahan

It is primarily gender dynamics that artist Sk. Sahajahan seeks to probe in his current solo at Akar Prakar on Hindusthan Road. Condemned to an inevitable but troubled symbiotic bind, the sexes seem to have defined as given the custom of aggression for men and passive enslavement for women.

Indeed, what may strike the viewer is the casual aggression that afflicts man-woman encounters in the artist’s oils, the suggestion of aggression as custom, habit. The unspoken violation of the woman’s body and of her being isn’t categorical merely in a work like Apple-eaters, with its three men eyeing an apple as a female form floats overhead. It is glaring even where ? especially where ? men are absent as in Waiting, which exposes the ambivalence of those who must sell their charms to survive. And that utter domesticity may in fact be an arena of fragile man-woman equations not entirely free of commerce comes across in a mixed media painting that appears innocuous on the surface but insinuates a grim sub-text.

Not surprisingly, the apple recurs as a motif and even splits open in the agony of childbirth. Violence, then, is written into the human psyche, as contorted, tumbling figures are cast in a space torn out of rational perspective. And yet, the artist looks for solace in simple pleasures like sailing boats in water or in Friends. But what endures in the viewer’s impression is what appears to be the terminal angst of Man With a Knife.

While the calligraphic elegance of Arabic/Persian and Japanese/Chinese has inspired inventiveness in 20th century artists, the svelte Bengali script and the more masculine English alphabet have been transformed into picturesque lettering in commercial art. And now we have artist Asit Mondal who took up the brush to bedeck the Bengali and English letters in visual finery ? colours, curlicues, patterns ? so that these were often reborn as amusing little images.

Like the Bengali ‘Ee’ for example, which was turned into a sharp-beaked creature with talons. And the ‘Chh’ which had morphed into a quaint horse. The same freedom wasn’t seen in the artist’s handling of English alphabet, however.

The artist’s sketches were noticeable for the swift, sure lines that conjured images without fuss and detail. The best of the works was Sea Voyage. The works were exhibited at the Academy of Fine Arts recently.