A photograph of Satyajit Ray by Asit Poddar

If it is Satyajit Ray’s birth anniversary some new publication related to the film director is bound to be released, or at least an exhibition of his photographs is sure to be organised. Asit Poddar’s black-and-white photographs of India’s best known auteur are being exhibited at Gallery Kanishka’s next to the sari shop on Hindustan Road.

Ray with his craggy face and sculpted profile was extremely photogenic and Poddar had put this quality to good use in his work. Going by the exhibition, Poddar had started this series in the 1980s when Ray was shooting Piku. Ray is caught with a cigarette dangling from his lips, laughing heartily, composing a score, and in his later years, sitting grim-faced before his easel.

Poddar was trained at the Government Art College, worked in ad agencies, and did a course in photography in Japan. This group of photographs — and they can hardly be called a body of work — is just another tribute to Ray.

Kerala-based Yusuf Arakkal’s series of paintings entitled The Street being exhibited at Sanskriti gallery hardly makes a point. He uses acrylic and oil on canvas, but before that he got silkscreen prints made of the images — men and women read newspapers, a man holds a stick while crossing the road, children and tourists ride bicycles, men make phone calls on their mobiles. A man relieves himself in a corner.

A painting by Yusuf Arakkal

In some of these he turns the human figure into double images, standing next to each other or apart. The backgrounds are uniformly dark. But that doesn’t increase the seriousness of the work. There are two frames of the same child caught from different angles. Together or individually, these images add up to little. They are ponderous but vacuous. Arakkal’s watercolours are more sensitively handled. In one, a man’s face is in darkness while his hair shines in the sun, and the others depict house plants. The well-produced catalogue has good photographs by Nemai Ghosh.

Abstract paintings by three artists are being exhibited at Gallery K2. Vishal Bhand uses a sober colour as the background that he splatters with paint. The paints appear in threads of colour that are wavy or turn into grids. Shilajit Ghosh uses hot colours like turquoise juxtaposed with yellow or black. He uses bold colours and geometric forms. White peeks through a glossy black surface in one work. Scrolls dramatically lit unfold in Sunando Basu’s painting. They are in bright colours like red and yellow. It is high time that Susmit Biswas outgrew those squiggles.