Poetic vision in lines and colours
Ranjit Das, draws a sparse vista at each turn of his array of artworks, more like pages of a book one is invited to flip through. Each of them inscribed with a chapter of a story, simultaneously ephemeral and condensed in the capsule of a moment from one picture frame after the other, each edition forging a part of the whole.
The current oeuvre by Ranjit Das, titled “Of a Poetic Vision of Life” now on at Shilpangan Gallery in the capital, is an exposition in semi-abstract figural studies. He creates a world unto itself, caught as it is in the passage between the present and the past and a wistful future. The rhythm of time, like musical registers, find its resonance in the poetic confluence on the picture plane of space and form, of light and shade, a rhythm invigorated by spurious interception of colours. Bare and free of experimental fuss, the images strike a curious balance between the apparent and what remains 'on the sly', thus, clueing one into searching for more than what meets the eyes.
In a number of works, the lines and contours, sweeping strokes, blotches and splashes of wash assume the prerogative of designing an artistic realm of solitary moments awash with a profound sense of longing. The figures appear desolate, melancholic, like flotsam entities in a dream unmoored from a 'wakeful' reality, hovering in the predawn hours of coming into one's own, becoming flesh and blood, figures without faces, yet strung together in the common thread of humanity. The virtues and techniques of watercolour serve virtuously to bring this retinue of 'studies in form' into view, ever shifting in the space of an overlap of hope and despair.
At times in black and white, at others partly stained in 'livid' colours, the shapes and contours recall images rooted in the primal memory of a collective belonging, of who one were and wish to be. One muses at the not-too-remote refraction of images threaded into a nakshi kantha onto the scroll-like expanse of a drawing populated by men, women, children and animals alike in an evocation of the quintessence of 'living', drawn as they are from the recesses of a cultural psyche; all of which infusing predictably into the synecdochal figure of the bird in the very foreground. Then it dawns on one that it is the dark blotches, seething and spawning between the figures surrogating an 'expected' backdrop that draws one's attention as they imbue the visual plane with the poignancy and urgency of the unexpected, of the yet to be seen and known for that matter. The pattern repeats in quite a few of the other works.
The exhibit runs till March 12.
The writer is a fiction writer & executive editor of Depart Art Magazine.
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