Mrinmoy Debbarma

Mrinmoy Debbarma (1982) was born in Agartala. This young artist completed his BFA in Painting, from Kala Bhavana, Visva Bharati, Santiniketan. He is currently doing his masters from the same institution.

Mrinmoy has exhibited in various group exhibitions in Kolkata and in the national level. He won the 49th National Award from Lalit Kala Akademi in 2006. He has also won a research scholarship from Lalit Kala Akademi in 2006. He has also been merited with Visva Bharati Merit Scholarship in 2006 and 2007.

Mrinmoy says about his work:
“I belong to Tripura. My birthplace is one of the seven states popularly known as sevensisters. This is one among many states which has been ravaged by violence. The act of violence and terrorism spreading its tentacles is the central theme of my work.

In today's urban scenario, many a times, one face confronts violence and terrorism. Whether it is local or global the tentacles of violence have managed to reached almost every society. This instability sometimes pops a question in my head – who actually spreads violence? In our childhood we are often unknowingly provoked to find a target. Today, video games and comic strips are often designed for children where they aim at their target, ultimately paralleling the notions of military power, which is to protect people from these evil acts/forces. But I often ask myself, who is the actual terrorist. My works reflect this grief stricken world of violence.
 
In the formation of my language, I have taken help of photo-realism and references from magazines , newspapers, vinyl posters, video games, cartoons and photographs to enhance and expand the possibilities of expression. I use characters like Tom and Jerry as a metaphor to question the act of violence . The introduction of popular design is itself an artificial device - a ploy to comment on the mechanized world, which produces violence. I introduce violence only in order to be able to critique it.”

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Jaydev Biswal

Artist's Statement
Journey from a small city to a metropolis is somehow a nice experience. My inspiration to do art stems from my interest to struggle for a cause and survive. My early life spent in a cosmopolitan town had given me a different kind of maturity. I have been interested in drawing since childhood. Thanks to the support that my parents and teachers gave me during my formative years helped me to do a lot of experiments that really tested my abilities to draw and paint.

I have a great interest in mysticism, meditation, philosophy, psychology, pranic healing, poetry etc. I have been intrigued by the power of these things to influence human thinking and feeling. I have always taken interest in the lacuna that exists between the binaries of things around; between the experience and the experienced, spectator and the spectacle, life and death etc. My mind goes, while thinking about this gap, from one extreme to another. I run around a void and make a circle of traces that remains as my work of art. That defines my limitations and capacities. The search for the meaning of this gap is a motivation for me to do art.

I like happiness and I like to paint the happy feeling emanated by philosophical thinking. I like to play with colors and forms. Besides, in a way I like to add a bit of bitterness to accentuate the feeling of happiness. My effort is to create a unity of time and space which embraces the conscious experience and travels from personal to the psychological and social plane. I work from binaries and opposites, which generate the forms of contradiction and oppositional metaphors and symbols.

My favorite images are those of a human figure floating above the ground, close up of human faces, animals involved in the human life etc. I give visual clues for the viewer to concentrate on my paintings. I sit silently doing nothing and the experience how the flower flowers. This is a philosophical attitude of mine and in my paintings I would like to generate that feeling of flowering. For me, as an artist, it took a long time to come in terms with the results of my internal searching and now I feel I am ready to come up with the experiences, energies and creativity that I came across these searches, in my paintings.

Biography
Jaydev Biswal (1969) has done his B. F. A. from the Faculty of Fine Arts, M.S. University, Baroda (1994) and later M.F.A. from the Faculty of Fine Arts, M.S. University, Baroda (1996). Jaydev has wonthe State Award, WAA , Bhubaneswar; (1992); All India Camlin Art Competition (1991); Gouranga Som Memorial Award (1991) and Rourkela Cultural Academy Award (1992). He has had four solo shows and have participated in several group showsfrom 1994 onwards.

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Banoj Mohanty

Artist's Statement
My works deal with the notion of ‘passive knowledge'. Passive knowledge is something related to the information technology boom and the modern ways of living. One can ve detached from the activities around one's life and at the same time get the knowledge/information about this through various mediums. Whether it be socio-political happenings or it be something closely related to human emotions, one can ‘pass through' it without getting affected by the intensity of these incidents or feelings.

As an artist, I have developed this way of looking at life, after I relocated myself from a small town in Orissa to the big city, New Delhi. When I was in my town, I used to feel and experience life as something very direct. Any human being gets the feeling of intimacy, as he or she becomes a part of the surroundings. The acquisition of information is more human, hence ‘active'. In big cities, even when we are in the midst of happenings, we feel a sense of detachment. Everything around you is mediated through newspaper and television. The incidents which you have been eyewitness to become something else when it is transmitted through various channels of information. Even love is now being mediated through technological devices like internet and TV.

Employing newspapers as base for my collage works comes from this sense of detachment. I want to engage this feeling of ‘passive knowledge' through metaphorical devices. Newspapers from Orissa, having a bit of nostalgia attached to it, become a surface and metaphor in my works at the same time. I use images of couples in certain situations to emphasis as well as to negotiate the fact that they are engaged in act of sharing, however, they are detached through the mediatic devices. They seem to be lost in their own worlds of ‘auto-engagement'. This sense of loss and detachment functions as a counterpoint to the sense of attachment and information gathering.

I feel that this passivity of life has become the hallmark of a post-modern life. There are continuities and whenever we feel this continuity is broken, we try to fill it up with imaginary solutions. It might sound a bit existential. However, I would like to look at this issue in a more engaged way. I feel I am inside this situation, though the sense of detachment troubles me, yet not able to handle it in an effective way. As an artist I find myself both included and excluded in this information flow. I try to negotiate with it through metaphors and direct images.

(Banoj Mohanty did his BFA from Utkal University, Orissa and MFA from Rai Foundation Colleges, New Delhi.He has exhibited in a number of group shows from 1998. He lives and works in Delhi.)

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Hassan Al-Saidi

Imprisoned in his sanctuary, Hassan pursues his art both as an anxious engagement with the lands he has left behind, and an eager exploration of ‘his Orient’. Hassan’s works betray constant negotiations between his engagement with European Modernism and his fascination with India’s ancient and medieval artistic tradition.

The iconography that is articulated in this body of works is imageries that have a definite association with the socio-political milieu of West Asia and East Africa. But the philosophy through which they are layered, the intersection of feminine sexuality and castrated masculinity, has echoes in (the so-called) Shaiva philosophy. This charges the semantic nuances of Hassan’s artistic practice.

Paper as a medium has always invited artists to be casual, experimentative and (hence?) spontaneous. For Hassan ‘oil on canvas’ is the medium he really cherishes. Paper works allow him to scan and ‘let out’ the various linguistic games that run in the mind of this traveller, explorer and sharp socio-political commentator.

This body of works shows an oxymoronic relationship with the medium… exploring the (traditionally understood) quality of the medium and yet at the same time the artist imposes a range of objects on the medium, challenging its sanctity.

Matters of Art presents Hassan's 12 works on paper.

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Pratul Dash

The new suit of fifteen watercolours by Pratul Dash locates the urban and the existence of the human beings in the urban locale. Pratul Dash probes into the issue of ‘dignified existence’ and inverts the meaning structure of the urban into a chain of parodied images. Like the simian population seen quite abundant in the city of Delhi, Pratul’s ‘protagonists’ perform different acrobatic postures against a suggestive backdrop of urban space. Even the saintly figure seen in one of the works is at the verge of a simian transformation. The sympathetic approach that Pratul upholds in his works protects these ‘beings’ from misinterpretations. Their avarice and struggles are visualized simultaneously in each figure. Urban space as a hen that lays golden eggs is one of the humorous notions conceived by Pratul Dash in an attempt to incorporate the mundane myths with sublimity of human life. Born in Orissa Pratul Dash did his BFA in BK College of Arts and Crafts, Bhuvaneswar and MFA from College of Arts, New Delhi. He has participated in several important group shows in India and abroad. He lives and works in Delhi.

R.Ramakrishnan

R.Ramakrishnan alias Chicko was an artist who dreamt of lands and myths as living organisms. Like Pablo Picasso who witnessed artistic transformations of objects and figures around him, Chicko recognized aesthetically unified forms and images taking shape in whatever he saw around him. He did not work much in colour but like a graphic incantation he went on drawing complex images using ink as his medium and paper as his surface. Landscapes evolved into elephants, tigers, bears, zebras and all other wild fauna. Inversely, these images transformed into landscapes. His imagination was fiery and feverish that led him to think like a surrealist. Each work by Chicko shows an unarticulated desire of his mind; a desire that galloped ahead with an unleash-able power. Chicko’s art lingua lingers between the real and the surreal. He subconsciously oscillated between the language of Salvador Dali and Rene Magritte. Dali’s painterly sophistication and Magritte’s playful juxtaposition of images find a curious re-interpretation in Chicko’s hands. Perhaps, Chicko was inspired by the Indian miniature tradition too, where composite imageries are seen abundance. Late Ramanujam was his immediate predecessor who too realized a world of angels and animals in his works. Erotic imagination is quite strong in Chicko’s works and the eroticised figures appear as a part of a personal mythology created by and for the artist himself. Born to an art critic father, Ramji, Chicko found ample freedom to exercise his creative thinking at a very early age. He studied as a casual student in College of Fine Arts, Trivandrum. However, his got educated himself in art through the large network of artist friends, anarchic life style and never ending journeys. He stayed in Delhi during early 90s. On January 1, 2005, Chicko passed away while living in Thalasseri, Kerala. Most of the works done by Chicko are collected and preserved by his friends. www.mattersofart.com presents an exclusive collection of Chicko’s work in its online show.

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Abhimanue V.G

Abhimanue V.G a noted contemporary artist from Kerala had his initial training from the College of Fine Arts in Trivandrum. He took his MFA from the Faculty of Fine Arts, MS University, Baroda and came to Delhi in the late eighties. He has had several solo shows in India and abroad and has also participated in several group exhibitions.

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