Discards from the wardrobe and around the home are reinvented as well, for they acquire connotations of living that transcend their finite thingness: in order to “depict not the thing” as Mallarme had said of Symbolist poetry, “but the effect it produces”. Especially by quizzing the fluid nature of found objects when they are re-contextualized into customised avatars. At the same time, the artist’s empathy with the deprived and the exploited lends a socio-cultural dimension to his art.

This time, he has concentrated on weaves, both cotton and silk. And on damaged cocoons. The delicate mesh of silk from them can be snow white or cream depending on the geographic address. This is an intriguing stage between the raw and the refined; when it can be called neither paper nor cloth; nor has it quite acquired the firmness of thread. And that’s how it retains its fascination for being a mysterious mutation in Nature that man can never quite analyze.

A distinctive country flavour emerges when chicken and duck feathers are added to a 6 ft x 3.6 ft cotton wrap, alluding to tribal cultures that reuse bird plumage. Sketched motifs link the object — the cloth, in this case — with the human environment in which it was made. Like a haggard, emaciated head that brings to mind toilers of the soil. Another work makes use of a 7 ft X 5 ft silk quilt, layered and stitched in the tradition of nakshikanthha. It is studded with sketches and little objects. A pair of them winks with a naughty, Dada insouciance for one object resembles a dainty panty and another mimics the male member.

Another Duchampesque prank nudges him to fish out an old pair of his own battered jeans. Out of one small pocket emerges, like a genie, a large, run-down canvas with stains and hectic graphite scribbles that simmer with the angry energy of underground graffiti. This cloth installation is rife with multiple innuendoes: the secret treasures of boyhood stuffed into pockets, the subversive put-down of purity, cleanliness and neatly packaged social — middle class — norms, the degage chic of youthful banter. In fact, there runs through this set a philosophic repudiation of the values promoted by industrial civilization and its market-driven culture.

As in Rashmi’s feminine vision, this is not a manifesto rebellion. Rather, it’s a kind of aesthetic fundamentalism by which a contemporary sensibility seeks to recover the somewhat utopian, bare-feet-on-the-grass spirit that Shantiniketan once embodied.

Rita Datta,
Art Critic,
Kolkata, June 2020

My work is not just what it looks like and feels like, it engages a process which has influenced how I live. My instincts, memories, philosophies and experience all contribute towards a holistic orientation, which integrates social and ecological concerns. The mediums and surfaces of my work are proactive players, they add to the form and content, to evoke a specific response. These four elements have a symbiotic relationship. For this symbiosis, my work involves physically, exploring materials and processes, because the content is about social unrest, violence and finding sustainable solutions from within the community and natural environment. Mediums and surfaces carry a purpose, history and cultural standpoint which are pluralistic in context to my social scape.

I combine found and recycled objects with traditional paint and ancient indigenous skills restructured to best fit with my temperament. I take time to let things settle down after initially working on it then leave it folded with a stack of other unfinished works. After things are aged with time, natural wrinkles and stains makes the surfaces look like an instinctual response towards the space we are within – nonstretched, uneven, sort of a creepy, crumpled and wrinkled landscape, a kind of saggy flesh as if hanging forlornly. Then I finish the work with a physical and gestural hubris often with a disparate mindset from the one with which I began the work with originally.

Kingshuk Sarkar
Santiniketan
02-08-2020

Click images for enlargement