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Saikat Surai
(Profile by Oindrilla Maity)
Saikat Surai completed his post graduation in Printmaking from the Rabindra Bharati University, in Calcutta, in 2006. As a child, he grew up in an ambience of art, music and cinema – all of which have a lasting impression on him. Both his mother and her sister were educated at the Vishwa Bharati University at Shantiniketan (owing to the fact that their aunt was the matron of the girls’ hostel), where the latter was a student in the Visual Arts Faculty, better known as Kala Bhavana.
Painting was Saikat’s favourite pastime as a child and that he had an eye for details became evident since then. He drew all that he saw around himself – the park, the swing, the slide and all rows of closely knitted buildings that stood on the other side of the narrow street that separated the houses from their own. Houses that fringed the horizon like irregular dentils spreaded all over around the house of the young artist. Saikat’s instinct as a young painter was nourished completely by the life in the dingy, drab and dreary locale of the old North Calcutta, with much of its glory fading with its dwindling past- the colonial times.
At the university, however, during the third year of his specialization Saikat was not offered what he had wanted. Instead he was chosen for the Print-making Department. “I wanted to change surfaces. It virtually turned out to be a boon when I was refused to take up painting as specialization.” Added to this was his evening lessons in animation, His earlier linocuts at the preparatory level had always shown a tendency to breaking away from the usual and prevalent mode of practice. Where his classmates would use a regular15x10 cm lino sheets, he would opt for a large 2x2 feet sheet of linoleum. Litho, etching, chine colle and viscosity etchings opened up new avenues for the stubborn pupil. Soon becoming a part of a team of friends – a vanguard - whom the others at the university sneeringly called ‘avant gardes’ at their back, experiments became a regular feature for Saikat and his mates.
His works now begin to show a lavish exuberance of energy; his canvases characterized by block like images and bold areas of textured patches. The forms that he was preoccupied with emerged typically out of his complex and obsessive personal relationship with women and limitless drinking. Consequently, phallic and other organic images along with his preoccupation with liquor bottles became part of his signature painting. Often this group of friends would leave for the suburbs; Shantiniketan, for instance, for nocturnal ventures in the rugged terrain and stay under the star-studded night, boozing and painting feverishly on surfaces in the dark. These paintings, needless to say, were results of intuitive adventures on paper. Body art and photo documentation was part of their favourite activities. The group turned out to be a socially non-conformist one and Saikat evolved with its growth. However, an indomitable urge to freeing the medium from its 2D constraints did not spare him. This eventually led to an animation projected on the walls from which the prints hang, during the final display of his Bachelors Degree, - an unprecedented display, which marks a completely new beginning in the history of not only the post colonial institution which he belonged to, but the others in the city, as well.
The following years of the Masters Degree saw the emergence of the artist as one who had completely shunned conventional surface practice and indulged his preference for videos. During this time he had been busy shooting a number of short films and doing a documentary on the faulty system of teaching at the faculty. A certain activist in him therefore, marks its trajectory from now. However, during the course he had considerably distanced himself from his surface practices that resulted into a very interesting series, which received much applause. For, ‘What to Do’ evolved out of sheer necessity when he was sent as a representative to attend the National Students’ Meet at the Delhi College of Art and going completely blank from dearth of existing system of surface practice he expressed his immediate reaction through the same spray-gun (one of his much used subjects, earlier) as a metaphor for his own self, haplessly flopped down on the ground.
Encouraged by the idea of his immediate reactions to given situations, Saikat kept using it. ‘Pink is In’, a traditional lithographic poster, having an exceedingly wide mount in the form of a vinyl sticker, printed on which were images of the city, reproduced from photographs taken by the artist – all in pink - is more of a reaction to the environs that he lives in. The event behind this was Hutch, the satellite network connecting company had changed its brand colour from orange to pink. “The entire city seemed to change its colour from orange to pink – all its hoardings and billboards, it was phenomenal!” says he. It also perhaps shares if not too remotely, Courbet’s idea: “To be in a position to translate the habits, the ideas, the appearance of my time…in a word, to make a living art, that is my aim.”
Another of his works, Identity - a larger than life blown up image reproduced from his voter’s identity card, is again his reaction against the governments banal methods of identification in the form of voters’ identity cards, in which the individual’s image invariably appears to be distorted, eventually degrading his identity. Saikat continues to work with his same reactionary ideas. One of his recent works, titled “My Birthday/ The Dynamic Resurgence of the Cola Avatar” is based on the public outrage on 21st November 2007, the same day, which also marks his birthday. Walking along the road with birthday presents in his hands the artist felt completely out of place when panicky pedestrians ran to their homes and the RAF personnel whizzed past him as they rushed to the site where the members of the Muslim Minority Forum gathered to protest against a number of incoherent issues starting from Rizwanur’s mysterious death, Taslima Nasrin’s extended visa and the Nandigram; and encountered the police with violence. They hurled stones at the police and set fire to a number of vehicles. A sense of guilt filled the mind of the artist. The next day, following a photograph of a policeman putting out fire at the site by pouring out bottled carbonated drink over it, engendered the idea of his installation: a flex print of the photograph borrowed from the newspaper, on which rows of plastic cola bottles, cut in halves were gummed and bearing images of terror stricken faces and the road map, where it all took place. |
