Secular Bent: Nayika, an oil on canvas by Arpana Caur

The complex figural compositions of Arparna Caur contain the power of protest in strictly aesthetic terms. Her journey as an angry and anguished artist began in the mid-Seventies when she was chosen by M.F. Husain to participate in a group show at Delhi?s Triveni Kala Sangam. In many of her works she has woven romantic yearnings in the same tapestry with facets of the wider phenomenon of social ?duality?, albeit seldom resorting to melodrama. Influenced by the linear architectural frames of Basholi and other miniatures, Caur has since kept on fusing disparate elements of indigenous art genres, involving classical and folk traditions, with varying degrees of innovative power.

Following her return from Mathura and Vrindavan in 1987, Caur did her series on widows. But because of her response, however righteous, to a well-known social phenomenon, involving poverty-stricken, tonsured women, the directness of her manner of empathising with them yielded mixed results. The same thing happened when she found herself emotionally caught up in the vicious web of Hindu-Sikh riots in Delhi in 1984 and painted pictures of genocide in fairly gory detail. True, she gradually moved away from the habit of showing bloodshed in direct visual terms and tended to depict social trauma at a controlled personal level.

But in the process she changed over to such remote and vicarious imagery as the drowning human figure. Her creations of the period, one of them included in the current solo exhibition at the Birla Academy of Art and Culture, is an example of her eternal problem of deciding on the right distance for dealing aesthetically with observed scenes of horror, while the piece titled Sohni evokes a visually convincing but bloodier spectacle. Caur?s more recent series reveals the artist?s secular bent, but the compositions named Immersion Emergence (2002) and Nanak and Mardana (2004) betray an increasingly emotional thrust.

Back from his successful European trip, Ganesh Basu is showing his works at the Birla Academy of Art and Culture along with paintings by wife Bidula and friend Puspita Ray. Judging from the number of exhibitions Basu mounts at Calcutta galleries and elsewhere each year, it would not be wrong to look upon him as one of our most prolific artists devoted to expatiating on a form which is his own. Variously described by critics as a primitivist of sorts and a protagonist of primal sexuality, Basu eludes any such rigid categorisation.

What is significant is that his definition of humankind is not separable from its essential animality ? the reason why his pictorial space is often seen replete with half-human, half-animal males and females seeking silent intimacy. Yet in few of his configurations does the artist portray explicit sex. A deft water and acrylic colourist, Ganesh shows a fondness for such subtle colours as lemon yellow, orange, green, vermilion, yellow and burnt amber.

Bidula?s paintings, rendered in the same water-based mediums, seeks to capture the spirit of traditional Indian concepts of flowing rhythm and their association with the feminine form, while Puspita Ray simulates the texture of mono-print impressions for bringing to the surface the message of floral forms.