Soliloquy from the Sub-Terrain:

In the period of scientific investigation, knowledge of the earth mutated, never to be the same again. The mythologized earth, worshipped as ‘bhu’ and conceived as ‘prithvi’, once believed to have emerged from the waters of a fabulous nebula now assumed gross material properties. The idea of land as yielding providential life source gained in material analysis, of different layers of its ossified matter. Simultaneously, our understanding of the earth became determined by borders, its possession the cause of conflict across the continents. As the subject of the poet’s contemplation and the painter’s evocation, the landscape in the 20th century surrendered its pictorial value and its aesthetic potential, to become the site of landfills, urban detritus, city dumps and a grim vision of urbanism, its once beautiful fields now seen as sites of genetic mutation and rivers that choke and bleed with city wastes.

In Arindam Chatterjee, however the excavation is at its deeper level, of the sub stratum that lies relatively undisturbed, beneath the busy engagements of the earth’s surface. It is a site that has not disgorged its buried secrets to interfering drills and inquisitive pylons that mar and spilt its surface. In its hidden state, cool and distant from the gaze of the sun, it remains innocent of borders, maps and check posts, sites of surveillance and investigation.

Such a reading of Arindam’s mixed media works on paper is not fortuitous. The works in their apparent quietitude imply a deep introversion, even little inclination to reveal themselves to the viewer’s gaze. Fractured forms elide, smudge and flow into one another, often bound by a darker deeper surface on the outside. Bits of white illumination puncture the irregular surfaces, elsewhere a flash of deep red soars across the surface like a wanton meteoroid, or a thought spinning out of context. In the yawning and tight crevices, surfaces seems to shine, water appears to collect.

The regular outer surface, plain and innocuous, does little to reveal the chaos of fractured thinking underneath.

And yet these are finally painted surfaces that receive the image. Arindam mixes styles to create his chosen effect. A muted palette of earth colours is rendered in wash, to evoke a sense of a spreading field, one that is generous and receptive. Upon it pastel drawing affords unyielding linear forms and shapes. The forms that emerge and subside integrate to create a sense of immutable structures occasionally. There are shafts of light, defined by singular threads that appears like a spider’s silk, embossed by dew.

Arguably Arindam presents a case for a deeper mode of expressivity. One in which the voice falls to a bass rather than rises to a treble, a movement towards the depths rather than the heights. He asks us to consider the gesture that turns inwards rather than outward, to different creative registers, as perhaps in the deep hollow gourd of string instruments, in the trajectory of the fall that plumbs an unknown depth, in the unyielding reserve of the deep earth. This is a position that is unyielding and indifferent to those that walk away. Nevertheless it is a language of its own kind, richly audible to those who will stay, and listen.