News & Event

Seemingly, we are living in an age of self-esteem; sturdy and stout enough to manifest our everyday-life, depicting profound thoughts and opinions on egoistic ways of living as well as being, in a sense of projecting self-entity. Ironically, all such bold aptitudes are regardless of the real world that we use to live, we use to deal with. Rather, even adopting the continuous bewilderment of the virtual reality we are discovering and articulating ourselves quite differently in the inescapable stream of social medias. But what actually happen into the real world where we are abide to move on with our bodily entities? Are we that strong and potent enough watching an injustice in front of our eyes? Or, ignoring the countless crimes the numerous strong virtual souls are normalizing sins even when the victims are compelled to pay off? Here, an unprecedented paradoxical mood lies; being simultaneously strong and ignorant at the same time in any socio-political realm.

But, amongst all these perplexed feelings some sensitive souls cannot but speak out in their own ways; depicting sheer expressions of their silent agony as helpless witnesses to such societal atrocities. Artist Ratnashwar Sutradhwar, in his exhibition Pixelated Paradox, is depicting his anguish as such a sensitive soul, being midst of the societal chaos and injustice happening around us. As a painter, artist Ratnashwar has had a persistent aptitude of experimenting thoroughly as he tends to pursue the ways of visual manifestation at his exquisite artistic style and approach. Thereby, as a sly craftsman, he deliberately fragments colors from his palate to possible vibrant shades maintaining both the analogous and complimentary positioning among them and then places them on his canvas in an order of side-by-side square shaped tints. In such way, very consciously he uses to articulate an image as a culmination of orderly placed color patches of square shapes which resembles the technique of the French pointillist Georges Seurat from the late nineteenth century. The process and its presentation are likely accordant to Seurat which demand the viewers to discover the image from a certain distance. But unlike Seurat’s impressionistic approach, these images are much complex having close coherence with our nowadays experiences of watching a video file that hangs suddenly and gets distorted into uneven pixels which, being stuck, only conveys the colored essence of any particular still frame. In his paintings, sometimes the whole canvas is filled up with such distortion and sometimes it only covers up any part of the surface. This depiction of pixelated images in an impression of hanged video files, momentarily, create the tension of any distorted happenings which attempt to connotate the inclusive ruptures of social orders, values and bonding at the same time. Our artist meticulously preserved to make us experienced with such anxiety of pixelated frames creating five different series of his paintings naming them Dispelled Moments, Tormenting Memories, Lost Tradition, Struggle of Musicians and Perplexed Paradigm, accordingly. The crumbled portraitures of his first two series, resembling the vibe of the fourth and the fifth ones, are conveying his dexterity of demonstrating the vivid expressions of the persons of different state of minds juxtaposing the facial and pictorial disruptions in individual frames. Whereas, in accordance with the other paintings, the series Lost Tradition endeavors to remind our traditional practices those are fumbling their ways in the global labyrinths being symbolized as the distorted images of two traditional folk-birds. These birds, getting stuck as well as crumbled, as if connotates our societal existence; though broken, enduring the pains of consistent torts, without being rebellious, they are silently sanctioning our cultural dooms.

Our pretentious selves perhaps never confess our inner societal disruption for sake of the ravenous thirst for cunning celebration of so-called self-esteem. These continuous perplexing situations of our contemporary time making us coward to confront the ultimate claustrophobic realities. Are these hypocrisy or ignorance? Or these are any undisputable ambiguous state of minds? Whatever the feelings are, assimilating all the moods artist Ratnashwar Sutradhwar’s paintings all in a sudden brings us in front of such paradoxical states of our entities through his exhibition.

Dhiman Sarkar
Art Writer and Assistant Professor