Hore’s works display an epic vision of angst and endurance

How vulnerable seem the skeletal beings, summoned to mute life with tempestuous scribbles. It appears that, besieged by the world around, they yet seek to endure in huddled anonymity. And what is it, if not a siege by the world around, these hectic lines and strokes, the seething paint and interludes of blind, white space that close in on the figures? On another level, it’s as though the creative enterprise were a catharsis of psychic turmoil, a sublimation of suffering, of deep concern.

This epic vision of angst and endurance comes from Reba Hore who exhibits her paintings, drawings and sculptures after a decade or so. Not surprisingly, a rich collection built up during this period. Which is why Seagull Arts and Media Resource Centre (off S.P. Mukherjee Road) has put some 337 paintings and drawings on view in four of the gallery rooms and even along the staircase, reserving one for the artist’s terracottas. To be seen till August 19, it’s a rare show of an important artist who, for whatever reason, chooses to live away from media glare.

Hore’s artistic sensibility was formed and ripened in a climate thick with contradictions and conflicts: the last years of the freedom movement, Partition, the famine, the best days of the Communist movement and then the souring of the Left promise. Having seen so much of life, could the private be cocooned from the public? Could her creative identity remain immune to the flux around her?

Perhaps that is why there’s the expressionist violence of strokes and colours and smudges in her paintings and drawings; why, as in Nos 14 and 18, the eyes may be sunken and cheeks hollow in starkly emaciated heads; why, even where nature is seen palpably to breathe, the outlines of trees quake feverishly; why the human figures are caught in a terrifying limbo. In a kind of wait. Or is it a wake? Maybe a bread line? Or could it be the impending gallows?

Her beings, tellingly enough, tell you nothing of their background. The faces are usually without features; the figures are bereft of the social identities that clothe people in what are convenient labels that come as handy references. And this nameless, homeless, stateless state lends to the works a precarious imminence, as though they were creatures condemned.

While you could read social sympathy into these works, that would be limiting their unsettling ambiguity. For what comes across more forcefully are the deeper psychological layers of resilient aloneness on the one hand, as each remains acutely alone even when clinging to others.

On the other hand, you can’t but sense the eternal truth of transience in these figures—seen in twos, threes, close clusters or lines—seeking solace in each other, trying to fend off dread and despair. Some lively animal sketches have a warm appeal. But No 195 is strangely disturbing in suggesting what seems like the private agony of pregnancy and childbirth in animals.

That Hore is also a sculptor is seen in the very lines she draws. But the small terracottas, displayed intelligently against black, call for a pause and close viewing. Especially of the weathered, battered heads that echo the philosophic conceit of the paintings: survivors sculpted by life itself.Sujoy Das