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Amitava Das, the quietly introspective painter, has for years
created images of haunting isolation on simple and silent canvases.
But suddenly there has been a radical change in style- the silence
has given way screams
It is as if the silence
has suddenly become a scream. The man, who for years stood in an
isolated melancholy, bent over by unseen burdens, is now being
violently pushed to the edge of his world. Innocuous animals have
turned bestial, and even lines acquired a killing edge. Violent red
and black have pushed out the muted tones that once dominated the
palette.
To anyone familiar with
the work of Amitava Das, (44) his new paintings are nothing short of
a radical change. For years now, Das has worked with little fanfare
and less media attention. Quiet and deeply introspective, he has
chipped away at creating his own vocabulary – far from the
madding crowd of he boisterous art market. The inner world of the
sensitive urban Indian – this is what has preoccupied him for
years. Now, in a fury, the conflict between the inner man and the
outer forces of aggression seems to explode on Das’ canvas.
“In, my earlier
paintings, silence was the language. They were noiseless, but not
dead. Now there is violence, borne of protest. There is no
celebration in this work. I am indignant that we are losing our
values.”
Such black despair has
perhaps gradually grown out of a childhood mind set with a
sensitivity to melancholy and man’s essential loneliness.
Reticently Amitava Das recalls his childhood in Shimla. The son of a
government official, he lived with his family above the railway
station. In the 1950s the walks in Shimla were still abundantly
wooded, and amid the leafy deodars and tall pines, the young boy
walking to and from school felt a nameless melancholy. Moreover,
nature in Shimla is civilizied. It hasn’t a coastal ferocity,
or the terror of a jungle, but the clean lines that we see in
Amatava’s earlier animals and tree forms.
During art college in
Delhi, Amitava had his first exhibition at the Kunika Chemould
gallery- and his horizons began to expand-and his horizons began to
expand. From Tagore he moved on to the more surreal poetry of
Jibanananda Das, and the modern Bengali writers Sudhin Dutta and
Shakti Chattopadhyay, whom he strongly identifies with. Camus,
Sartre’s essays on artists, and the lives of Rimbaud and
Baudelaire, the quintessential writers and rebels fascinated him.And
in music, if Mozart was a favourite , so was Mallikarjun Mansoor.
In the mid-70s Amitava’s
years at College of Art in Delhi coincided with a ferment in the art
world. A younger generation of artists experimented and reached out
with a newer confidence. “There was a great change in
direction”, says Das. In 1974, he became a founder member of New
Group, a Delhi based forum for artists. And between 1976 and 1978, he
joined hands with Manjit Bawa in organizing nearly 20 group shows of
artists.
Amitava’s own growth
during this period contained the seeds of his evolution for the next
one and a half decades. His format on paper or canvas gradually
became less and less cluttered to contain the simplest elements- man,
a tree, a bird, and the vast silent sky. “I started using
texture as an element in itself-surface quality became the language,”
he explains. Equally at home with pencil, ink or pastel, he developed
a vocabulary of dots, dashes and arabesques to create images of
haunting isolation. This language also lent itself well to printing,
which Amitava has done quite consistently over the years. Amitava
also created his own earth coloured hues, to create through subtle
tonal differences a tension between tree, wind grass and man. “In
those days I taught at Jamia Millia Islamia and the drive through
the open fields on the ridge gave me a clue”, he says.
Visually, the small careful strokes built up a spare vocabulary. But
the images and emotions spoke of devastating loneliness. With his
hands and feet, quintessential man stood vulnerably against the
most basic elements. And though Amitava’s treatment was
primarily figurative, his style and symbolic approach veered more and
more towards the abstract.
In 1990, this formal
tight structure began to undergo changes, as the dots and dashes
made way for more serpentine sinewy lines that charged the pictures
with an electric vitality. Similarly, his symbols- the tree or
animals forms became more distorted. The struggle between man and
shrinking environment to maintain their identity became more intense.
In the most recent crop
of paintings, which were recently exhibited at New Delhi’s Art
Heritage gallery, and oppression to violence. From small canvases Das
changes his format to large life-size paintings dominated by
different shades of thick impasto black paint. The single innocuous
bird or goat now assumes a hideous bestial form. The man, instead of
being bowed down by a weight, is being pushed hard out of the frame
of the canvas. Lines and columns that earlier had an abstract
balancing quality turn into piercing arros and spears. Instead of
silence an unquiet rages both within and without. Nowhere is this
more evident than in his use of symbols of destruction- the Goddess
Kali with her garland of severed heads, and her consort Shiva,
represented here by the moon. In another canvas, severed heads and
hands speak their own language, while a single bird plummets from a
Darkened sky.
As is this strength, Das
uses his brushwork as a language in itself. Thick reds and blacks
swirl and rise from the canvas. Man’s deepest sensibilities are
being assaulted, and the tones of black against black convey these
layers of despair.
Of these 14 new works that he
displayed, Amitava is typically reticent. “Painting is one way
of coming to terms with life around you”, he says. For an artist
concerned with the inner reality as much as with the outer, these
paintings are a profound comment on life as he sees it. But in the
context of his body of work, this phase perhaps contains a violent
crescendo that is the logical point to which tension must rise, to
spend itself. In the work that will follow, it will be interesting to
see what emerges, after the storm has spent itself.
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