The Surface Painter

Artist: Anandajit Ray

March 28, 2003 | 6.30 pm
Little Theatre, National Centre for the Performing Arts, Mumbai

The artist works in proscribed formats, the medium being watercolours and colour xeroxes, which recall genres as diverse as the miniature and the comic strip. There is the concurrent exploration of the dreary and the phantasmal, the ludicrous and the horrific, where the pain, violence and claustrophobia of urban conflict obliterate the humane. The key word, for Anandajit, is an accurate observation, and for him creation is sifting through ideas mentally, the image and the theme acquiring prime focus, the visual logic generating a thought process, rather than literal readability. The society that takes shape in his paintings is one of discord, the protagonist conveying the malaise of the distraught and fragmented times we live in, of complexities that are very much part of our psychological, private and public spaces.