An untitled acrylic on canvas by Ashok Bhowmik

The significance of Ashok Bhowmik’s solo painting exhibition at Galarie 88, christened Symbolic Expression, Multiple Charade, cannot be argued. This is his third solo show since 1995. He belongs to that generation of artists who emerged during the early 1970s and spelt out alternative visionary perception, quite different from the conceptual aesthetics of their immediate seniors.

After graduating from Art College, Bhowmik — along with his friends Tiloke Mondal, Rebanta Goswami, Prasanto Neyogi and Ratan Banerjee — formed a short-lived group that made its presence felt in those times. Later, Mondal and Bhowmik held several shows together. The partnership was well known for their unusual visual experiments that added to the ongoing aesthetic adventure. The artists attempted a subversive strategy to counter the grandiose tableaux that characterised their predecessor’s works. They challenged the prevalent tendency of myth making.

Mondal used raw contrasting colours to project urban scenes of malefactors and victims in a satirical way. Bhowmik depicted a dark, dank and moist world where insects crawled out of the earth and behaved like humans.

An ant would saunter around the park with her baby in a pram and chat with a neighbour looking on from the other side of the fence. Strange scary insects would drag themselves out of inferno. They were underworld creatures and were similar to Tolkein Hobbit’s Lord of the Ring trilogy. The glorious doubles partnership was broken after several years and both went their ways.

Bhowmik took up lectureship in Government Art College, Calcutta, and some years later, joined Kala Bhavan, Santiniketan. It was during this period that he tried to enrich his style by working with Ganesh Pyne’s visual fantasia. The twain did not meet and consequently Bhowmik’s works suffered.

In the present exhibition, he seems to have recovered much of the lost ground. He is back with his allegories that contain a mysterious note and the flat black space that acts as the background in his works. The only difference is that he no longer uses oil but acrylic colours, though he still paints on canvas. Against a pitch black background, Bhowmik paints his figures and objects in a single major colour which is contrasted with a couple of hues that illuminate the darkness. He enjoys the enactment of what the French call maitere — the art of building nuances of textures that enhance the character of a work.

All his paintings in this series are untitled and pregnant with obscure symbolism suggesting fragmentary elements of dreams and nightmares. Freud, Jung and Adler would have enjoyed interpreting these works in their very own inimitable styles.

An etherised lady patient lies on the table with a grasshopper standing upright on the ground, sucking her palm. A garish, red butted, country made revolver awaits the assassin’s palm. A guardian angel and a diabolic insect hovers over a flower.

A fish with a severed human head in his mouth flies over a bathtub. The profile of a beheaded king finds place under his throne. A sinister human eye rides a trotting mare. A queen from a pack of cards assumes a human face.

A mummified Egyptian woman holds a flower in her erect hand. She dreams of a key that dangles over her navel and can open two well-dressed lady-like locks above the key.

Bhowmik can see through dress and armour and is much possessed by death and can behold skull and skeleton under the skin.

The malleability and density of the material are in sync with his obsessive morbidity.