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River Sutra
JohnyML looks at the recent works of Soumen Das, who is ready with his fifth solo at the Hacienda Gallery in Mumbai.
"You cannot step twice into the same river, for other waters are continually flowing in," — Heraclitus, circa 500 BC.
Soumen Das |
River is an ever flowing metaphor. Those who have lived near a river know it for sure. River behaves like an organic being, changing moods constantly. What about an artist who has lived near a river? He takes the river along with him wherever he goes. River flows through the feelings of an artist. Soumen Das pours out his feelings about a river that he left behind and a river that he carries around like a cascade of petals. I would call this pouring as ‘soumya pathanam’ (soft falling). It rhymes and rings at the same time with the name of the artist.
What about this artist who paints a river without ever painting the actual water? One may come to identify a ghat, a flight of steps receding into an unidentifiable terrain, a cluster of trees intermingling with the concrete jungles. But Soumen Das does not paint a river. A brief biography that I got from the ever expanding realm of blogs tells me that he is born and brought up near a river. Perhaps, that is the only provocation for me to attach his works with the flow of a river. However, Heraclitus saves me. None can step in the same river twice. Soumen’s rivers are not the same rivers. They are transformed into many other things. Like in Heraclitus, they are other ‘waters’, flowing in.
I remember seeing Soumen Das going around like a character in Russian social realist novels, in the fine arts faculty of Baroda. A blissful smile was always there in his face. It was time when Baroda artists painted a lot in Italian trans-avant garde style and German neo-expressionist style. Soumen too traversed through these paths for a while but always giving his works an edge of abstraction. He worked as an assistant to the noted painters Nilima Sheikh and Gulam Mohammed Sheikh and this experience seems to have helped him to formulate a matured language for himself.
Soumen Das works in Casein, a medium that rarely artists use these days. Senior artists Viswanathan and Nilima Sheikh are the major exponents of this medium. Recently when the young conceptual artist Vivek Vilasini started working on canvas, he too preferred to work in Casein. Another artist who likes to work in this medium is the Mumbai based young painter Minal Damani. Casein, as it is a pigment based medium, allows the artists to have a great sense of lightness and luminosity. Tonal gradations give a transparent feeling to the images.
Having made Baroda his home, Soumen paints the architectural ensembles of the city like a miniaturist’s feel. Unlike his masters, he avoids narratives and goes deeper into the structural simplicity of the images. The architectural base of his works quite often gets transformed into various designs. At times they look like different layers of clothes embroidered with floral patters. However, he does not avoid suggestive markers in his works so that the viewer could comprehend the works in a positive way.
Soumen converts the predominant ashy tone of the Baroda city-scape into a luminous explosion of colours. The bright yellows and blues make his works pleasant and singing. These city-scapes and landscapes are hardly inhabited by people. However, one feels the human presence everywhere. The colours and forms are enlivened by this invisible presence of people. He has found his river in this city. And he never steps twice on the same street as other streets are flowing in. |
