A work by Swatee Nair

What does one write about three artists from Goa all of whom created large fields of muted shades alive with dashes and strokes of paint, mottled surfaces and fine lines of black that seem to delineate roadmaps and other urban space in a supposedly child-like manner?

The recently-concluded exhibition at Mon Art Gallerie titled strangely enough Three Amigos after a Hollywood slapstick comedy, featured Deviprasad C. Rao, Suhas Shilker and Swatee Nair, all of whom have chosen to work together, although they did not train to be artists at the beginning of their careers. Their paintings have a lot in common. It is not just that their works are non-figurative but their apparently-random brushwork too has much similarity.

It is easy to pass off their work as “surrealistic poetry” and other such claptrap, as was done in the catalogue. But the reality is quite different. Actually, the painters with their calligraphic strokes and smudges have gone back to masters such as Gaitonde and Paul Klee who have used a similar technique successfully, and needless to add, with very different effects.

However, of all the three, Swatee Nair seems to have a surer grip over the contents of her mixed-media works, in which she does not hesitate to try her hand at collage. She exercises greater control over her brushwork and thereby, her works have a firmer body. Swatee had studied English literature in college and was a journalist to boot. Strange are the courses that our careers take.

A sculpture by Sunil Kumar Das

Mallhar, a cultural organisation which promotes the arts and has organised performances by Ravi Shankar, Amjad Ali Khan, Yamini Krishnamurthy and Nikhil Banerjee, to name a few, is celebrating its golden jubilee by holding an exhibition of works by some eminent artists at Chitrakoot gallery.

The list of friendly artists who had contributed their works is quite impressive — Jogen Chowdhury, Lalu Prasad Shaw, Bikash Bhattacharjee…. But they are there only in name, mere apologies. Bikash Bhattacharjee’s small watercolour, for example, was done when he was a student. Some of those are excellent studies but this particular one looks like a half-hearted affair. The same could be said of the contributions of Jogen Chowdhury, Shyamal Datta Roy, Aditya Basak and Rabin Mandal. Although all the works are signed — and that’s what matters today — they were all executed in a slapdash manner.

However, Suhas Roy’s portraits of a woman glimpsed in soft darkness, Sanat Kar’s tempera and Manoj Dutta’s pastel drawing of a folk doll-like woman are an exception. Nobody can fault these technically. The most remarkable exhibit is by the deceased artist Dharmanarayan Dasgupta. It is a beautiful drawing in black and white of a man’s face with distinctly tribal features.

The sculpture — particularly Sunil Kumar Das’s — contributions are of a better quality.