A graphic by Arun Bose

When you think of painter and print-maker Arun Bose, whose retro is on at CIMA till January 31, you think first of the delicate ambience in his paintings, the philosophic intimations generated by his treatment of light and shadows: a visual syntax of time.

The light is seductive, intriguingly ambivalent. Accentuating the concealed, insinuating the implicit through what is revealed. The afternoon sun may lean across a window and period floor that recedes into the cool depths of a darkening room; or gently drape half the exterior wall of a stucco house whose roughly-cut windows imprison impenetrable darkness within. Pigeons and crows and peacocks may be the only signs of life. Or there may be a melancholy glow on a mud wall at night, etching textures on the surface and sketching shadows of things hung from nails. Very village things. Like a sooty lantern and a bottle for oil. What is and what may be, the here and the beyond, poised at a moment of contraries: stillness and transience. Silence. A full, echoing silence.

No doubt it is the solitude of his life in the US that permeates the canvas. And so common material things — mud walls and windows, shingles and bricks, diagrammes of shapes and shades turn sentient in Bose’s poetic vision, mystical, extra-real. Poetic, and sensuous in its tactile richness, but without the romantic’s indulgence. In fact, there’s a structural rigour, a meditative classicism in the organisation of space that’s probably as much a result of his training in the West as of his sensibility.

The rigour in organization is transferred to the prints, too. But the imagery is more often an assertion of the inexplicable complexity of life. And no wonder. All these years India has simmered within him, filtering into the prints. The heat and dust, the colour and clamour, the bizarre and the fantastic.

Although Bose is said to have started out with social reality — emaciated street urchins, for example — the bizarre and the fantastic would become part of his repertoire of images, importing a teasing mystery into some works hinting at a private mythology. Like the print Queen and King done in1975 and on view at the show, which also reveals the stylistic influence of modern Western art. Several prints draw sustenance from the pageant that is India: the Hare Krishna mantra in Bengali script; sacred motifs and symbols like the swastika and the Om; tropical animals and birds, like elephants and bulls and peacocks; deities and traditional designing forms like the chaalchitra, laid out in geometric schemes and textured, matte tones. While personal allusions may have been important, the shared heritage of his roots seems to have inspired his creative imagination.

But again, the artist may relapse into reticence elsewhere as objective reality is reduced to semi-abstract arrangements. The best works to cite in this respect are Moon and Mountain (1982), Spider’s Fantasy (1979), Sun (1988) — all three viscosity etchings — and Heart (undated), a litho.