Is there any essential difference between the creative processes of academically fashioned artists and those who are best described as autodidacts? The answer is apt to be clouded by the fact that even the most significant among the latter, such as Rousseau and Gaugin, could not screen themselves from visual experiences of having constantly watched the work of academically-trained artists of their own time or of yore. Innocence, the silent fountainhead of true creativity, is seldom given to artists of today.

Anupam Gupta’s oeuvre, on view at Chemould Gallery, convinces one that he has been long engaged with his easel and has thus been able to offer his best at this first solo exhibition of relatively recent work, executed in different climes involving a variety of thematic contents. Most of the pieces on display were fairly straightforward, albeit sophisticated, depictions of situations involving landscapes as well as humanscapes. But he also allows us a glimpse of his mindscape in such pieces as Nostalgic Fantasy, Malhar, Carnal Spiritualism and The Deities of Puri.

The figurative aspects of his imagery in these works are virtually incidental and reflective of his faith in the intrinsic power of cognisable objects to picturise abstract concepts.

Gupta’s aesthetic explorations relate more to poetic feelings than technicalities of formal construction, the reason why he could have avoided including the few drawings there are in the exhibition, and thrown in a few more full-blown paintings instead.