Kriti, a group of five young and deft manipulators of their own chosen medium, held its exhibition recently at the Birla Academy of Art and Culture. What distinguishes each of the group’s members is their departure from the run-off-the-mill thematic constructions. Mukta Dey likes to put to use the physical plasticity of clay with a view to moulding into shape her private feelings. Shohini Gupta deals with the subject of food. She works with the conviction that unlike the other animals, the human race has the distinction of adding considerable aesthetic values to the food they cook, serve and eat. The mundane subjects that concern Sutanuka Giri’s explorations constitute the inconsequential world of reality for the artist. A pair of plastic sandals are of greater significance than sensational news items as far as Giri’s world of creation is concerned.

Samir Dasgupta

Angikar’s new double bill begins with Somnath Chaudhuri’s absurdist Sei Sur, where an alienated youth cons people in a park, and is warned by his conscience not to stray. When he finally chooses virtue, the cops pick him up for suspicious behaviour. This ironic one-act is followed by the full-length Abasthan, into which Chiraranjan Das tries to pack everything: domestic, social and political melodrama. A man gives up radicalism and marries for convenience; he and his wife always fight, especially over their Anglicised daughter’s future; his old father hallucinates about his estranged wife; a subaltern romance brews. The greatest excitement occurred when director Kiriti Datta blew his top backstage and his roars about various glitches drowned the onstage dialogue.

Ananda Lal

It is doubtful whether what is often described as spiritual art has any generic significance, separate from the mainstream of aesthetic creativity. True, aesthetic ideas also undergo substantive changes from time to time, introducing newer ways. Joy Bhaduri, a young ‘spiritualist’ painter is not oblivious to these time-honoured principles of art, the reason why his work is not overtly spiritual (exhibited at Chitrakoot Art Gallery). He does believe that in this world of man’s wrongdoings, God is not yet dead. But while contemplating the relevance of existence in terms of nature’s pristine and indifferent creations, both gentle and wild, the contemporary painter seems to draw his vitality from such primal manifestations that man has not been able to obliterate.

SDG