“Years of observing and sketching,” wrote Jatin Das in 2002, “culminate in the making of a line.” Charged Figures: the Art of Jatin Das at CIMA Gallery (February 23-March 17) is, at one level, a bravura display of the painter’s mastery of the line, mainly through depictions of the human body. Das was born in 1941, graduated from Mumbai’s JJ School of Arts in 1963, and has been painting and sculpting prolifically since then. This exhibition gathers around 65 works done mostly between 2004 and ’07, together with some from the late Nineties as well. There are large oils and acrylics on canvas. But the most striking are the watercolours and the conté (fabricated chalk) on paper.

Das’s adventures with the line are inseparable from his unabashedly eroticized celebration of the body, mostly female but also occasionally male. Instead of calling them nudes, he prefers to describe them as “energized bare figures”. The women are absorbed in dance, song, contemplation or ecstasy, and more than their clothes, what they seem to have shed are time, history and the burden of the flesh — without becoming disembodied in the process. They are reduced to the essence of their physical movement or stillness. And this simplification of the human form into timeless motion or stasis takes the figurative substance of Das’s work towards some sort of abstraction. With titles like Movementing and Balancing, Music in the Air, Massive Stance and Heads & Masks, these are paintings that aspire to the condition of sculpture, music, dance and a kind of pure theatricality. The single figure dominates, but there are also encounters and confrontations, depicting sexed exchanges — “intense dialogues” — between the seer and the seen, the artist and his model, minimal figures and creatures of pure colour (Two in Monochrome). Particularly in the watercolours, minimal lines and strokes create bodies of fine colour, rarefied forms that are reminiscent of Chinese art, as in Stretched to Eternity and Lyrical Grey.

This is a happy and weightless art, pleasing to the eye — a little too pleasing, in fact, in its unmodulated, colour-coordinated ebullience. Even the seers, thinkers and prophets, the gyani, the vairagi, the “one-legged saint” and the “lone seeker” are absorbed in lightly histrionic postures, refusing to take themselves very seriously, their often-droll faces devoid of inwardness or depth. They are bodies, rather than selves, creations of form, line, colour and agility, so that even the most imposing oils remain undemanding works, but skillfully executed and not lacking in wit: the blur of moving heads, hands or feet, and sometimes the eyeballs seeming to leap out of their sockets, like living monocles attached to invisible springs.

What locates these paintings in a classical Indian tradition are the sharply drawn hands, with their long, tapering, upturned fingers stylized into a variety of mudras. These beautiful hands turn their owners into nayikas or yakshis whose proper homes are Khajuraho, Konarak, Mahabalipuram and Ajanta, Sudraka’s Mrichchhakatika, Jayadev’s Gitagovinda and the Natyashastra. They find themselves effortlessly transported into the cosmopolitan world of urban Indian art, haunted by Matisse, Picasso and Rodin (of the sketches and watercolours, rather than the sculptures). But there is also the influence of Ramkinkar Baij and Javanese art, and the folk as well as classical traditions of the painter’s native Orissa.

This promiscuous mixing of traditions and influences is essential to the exuberance of Das’s creative personality. But his art’s eagerness to travel and thus absorb new human and stylistic encounters (Africa, Israel, Russia, Sweden, China) creates expectations of evolution and change that may not be met entirely for viewers who look for qualities more profound than the witcheries of line and colour. This is work that evidently delights in its own “linear resourcefulness” (Nissim Ezekiel’s phrase). Das describes how “the sweep, the turn and the twist of the fingers, the angle of the nib” create “the peculiarities of a line”. His “flowing bodies,” Dom Moraes had written in a rather generous sonnet to the painter, move “Towards a truth few can face,/ The horror and happiness of creation.” Nothing in this show is really all that difficult to face. The happiness is there for all to see, but where exactly is the horror?