Contemporaryart India

Debabrata Chakrabarti : Speaking of his art, Debabrata Chakrabarti says ‘…nature and man commingle and arrive charged with meaning. Within the framework of the canvas, the woman’s body is an extension of nature itself, as also the times we live in …thus my canvas comes closer to the universal truth, and its color and shape are determined by it.”

Subtle watered textures add an almost mystical dimension to Chakrabarti’s shimmering colours, often patterned around incandescent spaces of luminous white light.

While women and children are the artist’s most consistent themes, and emotion or haunting lyricism his most pervasive mood, his works also carry for the most part a trenchant social message; whether the defenselessness of exploited children, the subjection of women to social oppression, or the vulnerability of a pair of siblings who confront their shattered world in the numbing stillness ‘After the Earthquake’.

Shuvaprasanna : Although Shuvaprasanna's artistic career unraveled in the 1970's, his art is rooted in the ethos of the pioneering '60's. He connects in spirit with those artists who worked in the figurative mode with meticulous attention to craftsmanship, and whose work crystallized from an overwhelming emotional response to the realities of their environment. They were liberal spirits, unfettered by artistic `dogmas' about form or content, and while confidently rooted in their perceptual reality they looked for universal values in their art.

But, in the words of art critic Manasij Majumdar, "(Shuvaprasanna) enriches this trend by bringing to bear on his work, densely impacted conceptual and pictorial precisions ... (which) lend his imagery an unusual visual intensity ... (he) comprehends the subject with passionate empathy or ironic detachment ...His themes come from his personal interactions with Calcutta's urban milieu - its sickness and sordidness, its violence and vulnerability and all that compounds its existential agony in an out-of-joint time."
His splendid series in charcoals and acrylic created to mark Calcutta's tercentenary year in 1990, forcefully evokes in black, white and sepia the stunning paradoxes that define Calcutta's singular ambience - the crowds and the emptiness, the traffic and the smog, palatial mansions and rubbish heaps, magnificent statues and predatory birds, homeless children and great humanitarians, the unique skyline and, above all, that extraordinary vitality that enables the city to survive.

In the artist's own words "Long before the English merchants reached its shores, Calcutta was dominated by large mosquitoes and scavenger storks. Then there were the black dacoits of Calcutta and the Goddess of darkness ... are you looking for a riot of color? Let your eyes turn inwards and you will find how easy it is to locate within black whatever color you have been seeking ... Calcutta is a wonder of wonders, a city of contradictions, light and shade, black and white ..."

The emotionally charged images of his earlier works, and also his later paintings and prints, reflect "his exceptional power to grasp the facts of reality in terms of sparse motifs of no anecdotal content, or as one critic rightfully observes, of no 'personal countenance', but severely abstracted and transformed into visuals invested with layers of incisive symbolic or metaphorical meaning."

Along with his cityscapes the artist has also done a sequence of bird images in his `Ave' and `Amphibious' drawings, prints and paintings. A vivid
imagination and powerfully meticulous craft are imaged in the way he structures, stroke by meticulous stroke, infinite variations on a single motif.
In Shuvaprasanna's latest works, the earlier starkness and angst have mutated into richer colors and quieter themes and representations. But energy and empathy, dramatic force and richly textured symbolism, personal emotion and impeccable technique still impress on his works the conviction of truth that defines the work of an 'original' artist.

 Dipti Chakrabarti : The beauty of Dipti’s paintings emerge from the sensitivity with which she plays with contrasts and depths of colour and texture to create subtle variations of light and shade in her landscapes. This imparts a haunting –almost mystical –lyricism to her compositions.
So an opalescent glimmer of water shines mistily through the clearing in a sun-dappled grove, and delicate colors and textures weave patterns of luminosity into a backdrop of somber tones and opaque forms, to capture the magical play of passing light on sturdy tree trunks, leaves and earth in a densely wooded forest.