Nor do agitated lines charge with a haywire frenzy across muscular structures. In fact, he doesn’t even use acrylic any more, preferring ink and natural pigments derived from barks of trees and from leaves, while the canvas has been replaced with silk sheets that are almost white, but not quite. This change in the medium might, just might, be a Shantiniketan syndrome.

But, even as he’s been paring down his expression, his brushwork remains spontaneous emphatically ensuring that the cogent minimalism so intrinsic to design grammar doesn’t turn into a predetermined rigidity. Indeed, the broad, sweeping strokes trailing hiccups of straggly bristles, bleeding penumbrae at the verges, or scattering accidental drops of ink, speak of a muted volatility. It is these ‘imperfections’, the unplanned side-effects, so to say, that breathe sentience into inert bands, and take them away from the exact replication of mechanical reproduction. It’s as though the ink and the brush have minds of their own and resist being wholly subservient to the will of the artist.

Bhand insists that it’s form he seeks to express and not calligraphic elements. There is, no doubt, that the hint of the familiar lies in his strokes which the viewer may decipher in terms of known images and the fundamental essence of their shapes. Vertical and horizontal bands, circles and arcs, along with biomorphic curves and thick dashes encourage symbolic interpretations: a tree trunk here, a river there, unknown creatures elsewhere. A pair of strokes, one vertical and one curvaceously feminine, could even be seen as a gender reference. But this search for a literal representation in shapes strips them of the unscripted tease of ambiguity.

Like Malevich’s square and circle or Mondrian’s rectangles, that conveys inchoate sensations rather than explicated meanings, Bhand’s works appeal primarily to the viewer’s aesthetic sensibility. The kind that would heighten the fluent grace of calligraphy, one that radiates an autonomous beauty beyond fixed linguistic meanings.

At times, the artist couples his strokes with delicate leaves that are printed on the surface of the silk, importing a clearly East Asian resonance. Elsewhere, blurred stains of little leaves offset heavy, black, Klinesque characters that seek to claim centrestage. But the set that induces a range of tones, textures and intriguing, elusive clues comes from dipping large, creased silk sheets in natural pigment. What emerge unbidden from this chemistry are tactile topographies of varied nuances.

Rita Datta,
Art Critic,
Kolkata, June 2020

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