Rathin Barman is a young artist from Tripura who was trained in Rabindra Bharati University. The change in the landscape as he shifted from a small town to Calcutta made a lasting impression on him and this is reflected in the works on display at his exhibition, And my eyes fill with sand..., at Experimenter (till February 4), where the varying urbanscape of our city is one of the main components of his creative output.

Barman also seems to be intrigued, excited and inspired by juxtapositions — of nature and manmade objects, actual specimens of material used in industry and representations of the produce of nature, and in more fanciful extensions of the strategy of contrasts, he places the actual object against a photograph of the same. This underlines the points of similarity and departure. Barman also loves to make things with his hand and these objects become part of the elaborate site-specific works he creates.

Ideas overlap when the material with which he creates a particular work becomes a statement on the work itself. He has used an entire range of packing boxes of consumer products to create a modern flat, complete with furniture. It is a comment on the peripatetic lives of professionals of today and a metaphor for shifting base. In another installation, Barman has created a section of a crumbling old house that, one realizes, is partly a photograph of the exposed brickwork that forms the background. In the foreground is a column made of bricks collected from the ruins of a Calcutta palace, and when one looks carefully enough, one discovers actual bricks sticking out of the photographic print of the wall. It becomes difficult to distinguish between illusion and reality.

Barman takes this blurring of lines even further by installing doll’s house furniture on the protruding pieces of brick. His flights of fancy become more apparent in his “tree”, with tools used in the construction industry hanging from its bare branches. These tools are made of used firebricks collected from old houses demolished to construct highrise structures. This the artist makes with his own two hands. Like his firebrick tools, the apartment of discarded boxes too is perfectly made.

Then Barman flies off on a whimsical tangent in his coloured drawings. He uses humdrum objects, the commonest of vegetables and sections of the bodies of animals, and places them in the most unlikely and inexplicable conjunctions. There are bananas and callipers and combs, actual industrial materials like felt and drawings of tools, the body of a dog whose face is stuck inside the bottom of a chair and suchlike, with smoke billowing from each arrangement. He does have an eye for the absurd.