Of Energy, Serenity and the Divine
Towards the end of his life, the Irish poet W B Yeats remarked that man can embody the truth, but he cannot know it. In his mixed media, graphic art, installation, and performance, Kalidas Karmakar renders this distinction between physical and intuitive knowledge blurry, harnessing a mystic way of knowing through untrammelled insight to penetrate the unmediated experiential knowledge bound up in substances and artifacts.
The 72nd solo exhibition by Kalidas Karmakar now being held at the Institute of Art and Culture (IAC) reiterates his predilection for metaphysical knowledge and gnostic experience.
Kalidas sees art as having a spiritual dimension: he draws his symbols and images largely from tantric as well as Sufi traditions. Nature also serves as a source of his inspiration. There is a tactile quality in many of his works, especially those done in handmade paper where images are sometimes embossed and embellished with objects used by the Indian sadhus or mystics. His images and symbols bristle with knowledge encoded in them; they also possess a more arcane knowledge acquired through their association with tradition and culture.
Kalidas deals with a variety of mediums with ease and dexterity. Whether he works in etching, oil and acrylic painting or mixed media, his artistic signature is unmistakably imprinted. In oil and acrylic he applies his paint with force in thick, sweeping strokes; in etching and mixed media he uses his palette as a source of fluid and cascading colours. For him the very act of applying paint is a liberating, almost sensual experience. He delights in combining raw energy, expressed through violent brushstrokes, dipped in tradition, myth, and folk belief.
Viewers of the current show will also see a number of his characteristic drawings: animating the surface of the work, the sketches are random scrawls and scribbles, recalling the freedom of expression of a child's drawing. The faces in the drawings appear completely unaware of the viewers' presence. Their gazes are fixed on the horizon, perhaps trying to decipher the meaning of our existence and our relation to the cosmos.
His compositions are intuitively organised, displaying spontaneous use of colour and sensuous arrangement of space. The highly interactive and multilayered surface of his paintings invite viewers to get involved with the forms and contents of the art work and the elements of gnostic experience deposited in the images and symbols unfold through invisible meanderings of their meanings in the minds of his audience.
His works have a heroic confidence in their quietness and their echo. Essentially modest, they allow the viewer a wide focus of interpenetration, but with firm generosity direct the attention of our gaze to look through the condition of the human lens, its emotion, isolation, and thirst for the divine. The exhibits of the show do not have individual titles, but individual numbers and are part of the series called 'Alluvial Faces & Diary.' Each work is like a bead of a rosary, complementing each other to perform an artistic meditation.
Finally, for Kalidas art is a language of communication where images and symbols merge and mutate effectively to channel the light of the divine and the transcendent to the audience. But religious experience is not only ethereal; it has its cultural and geographical dimension as well.
The title of the exhibition 'Alluvial Faces & Diary'informs us that divinity has a cultural mooring and emanates from traditions of alluvial land, which is Bengal.
Ziaul Karim is an art critic.
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