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The Majestic Chariot
Pradip Maitra is in love with steam engines. He paints them as if they were his soul mates. Oindrilla Maity discusses Maitra’s art and its historical lineages, and above all this artist’s undying passion for the ‘iron beauties’ in this touching review.
You can lose yourself amidst the thick morning fog. You can jump up in consternation, as you all of a sudden encounter a dark, monstrous face – a virile iron structure – appears before you – ripping off the blanket of the thick fog – the rest of it disappears into nothingness. The deafening sound of its iron wheels – the clamor - all of it leaves you into bafflement. The dark mass of sooty steam, gushing out of its chimney leaves a thick dark trail against the ephemeral wall of the morning fog, only to ensure that it, too will dissolve away, only after a short while.
Pradip Maitra’s watercolors are rendered in such tangibility. You can feel all the six senses coming alive if you happen to be one of the onlookers who has walked into the gallery featuring his solo show – The Chariot of Civilization (at the Birla Academy of art and Culture, Kolkata, between 13th to 28th November, 2007). The entire show had one single theme - the steam engine .the dwindling history of the steam engine was an absolutely painstaking experience for the artist (which was officially called off during 1998), for it became an obsession. He had spent day in and day out at the car-shed for a prolonged period of eighteen years, without a pause and finally made it to the Sotheby’s for two times and thrice to the Osian. A major part of his work had been ruined by termites and yet another has been damaged in the rain – for often he would roll them up and stuff them between the bamboos that fringed the roof of the shanty, beside the car-shed at the Ultadanga station, in north Kolkata.
Pradip Maitra’s work show an indomitable fortitude through an extravagant wash technique rendered in a frenzy – a madness which virtually makes the onlooker feel that the artist had been copulating with the all pervasive force of the iron structure. To quote the artist, “ I was married to the steam engine”.
A somber mood created by the foggy morning makes you feel abandoned – the same feeling generated by Pamuk’s description of the deserted Galiph who wakes up to his senses on a chilly winter’s morning only to find his wife has gone, in The Black Book, or the tragic protagonist against a drab, cold and dark day in Bela Tarr’s poignant movie - Damnation. On the contrary the engine’s all pervasive presence reminds you of Turner’s worship of energy. True, Maitra is a born romantic and the Romanticst’s temperament has no dearth in him. Throughout has he indulged his preferences for the melodramatic and the catastrophic. The same qualities that one witnesses in Turner’s painting “Rain, Steam and Speed”’, “Rockets and Blue Lights” or “Snow Storm: Hannibal and his Army Crossing the Alps”.
Each region has its own spotting and light and a desparate determination dominates his works. The rich contrast of the palette heightens the drama in which the opulent blackness retains its grandeur against the pallid dullness of the steam and fog. The greatest range from light to dark also reaffirms the grandeur of the stolid iron giant – a dense mass of black against the white veil – as the perpetual against the ephemeral. The engine – its lashing tail, its fiery breathing, the smell of the charring coal, the thick dark cloud of steam gushing out of its chimney are obvious metaphors for transgression, speed and the knowledge/dawning of realization and an indomitable spirit that knows no bounds.
One can experience the tangible world all around him through Pradip Maitra’s work, an artist who virtually whips up the stagnant traditional wash technique that shares a colonial lineage.
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