Kolkata is best savoured slowly as one encounters its bewildering diversity. It seeps into your skin like a balm or that bitter pill that is repulsive but is healing and grows into one's being. It has changed attitudes as one deals with the contradictions of time-honored tradition and uneven modernity. It is challenging to understand the underlying humanity, tolerance and the innate spirituality. For an artist' the extraordinarily intricacy of color and pattern is visually stimulating.
Beena Pradhan is an artist finding her own rhythm amidst her contemporaries who are part of the figurative fervor. Beena's images capture the cacophony of Kolkata, with a splash of expressionistic color. She pushes the viewer into a street, the view from the hand driven rickshaw making its way through a busy street encountering a wedding baaraat. A sense of celebration is in the air and the artist is part of this theatre of life. She paints characters like bandwallahs, human relationships, and a reality about people who work with a mantra for survival. She accentuates the lyrical, the sensuous , and the aural sensations, preserving the resonance of these people and their chaotic spaces. In fact, she is surely enjoying herself painting this carnival, Beena adapts the shrill colors from German Expressionism. Her motifs of wide-eyed woman and bulky bandwallahs are her stock images and trace back beyond late Modernism. With her messy surfaces and trademark style of Neo-Expressionists the artist reintroduces representation and overt feeling. The works combine new painterly devices with the subjective interpretation and transformation of historical motifs; and thereby create a new visual experience, a new validity.
She employs the play of surface with depth and uses lines, planes, and colors to experience space. By focusing form one element to the next, she creates absorbing detail of humans in the per formative mode.
The current body of work has evolved form the urban landscape. The artist encounters the harsh urban realities; much of it is defined by architecture and people living on the edge with dignity. This is the order that represents the fears and anxiety of the city. the new metropolis that define the country. The play with scale makes them larger than life; she celebrates the ordinary and gives it the status of an icon. Her objects grow beyond human scale and control, her palette plays with somber atmospheric tones and bursts of bright cadmium red and ultramarine blue.
Beena's intimate images explore human feelings, relationships, and tangible tensions about seduction. Her representations initiate and consolidate the conjunctions between the overt traditional imagery. She frees it from the tedious god/goddess narratives and staged religiosity to give it a secular space of its own. Her images of interior spaces are all lit with the dramatic precision of a theatre set; the light and shades enhance the magic and mystery of these situations. The artist promotes self- indulgence, without idealizing the woman. She recovers and celebrates female sexuality and desire as contemporary concerns. For Beena, it is all about evoking human energy and dignity in an increasingly brutalizing environment. The artist has emphasized the human presence with her sensibility; her images suggest the underlying concern of the urban metropolis, displacement, migration and the colonial hangover. She weaves the gestures and fragmented narratives of the human condition. Her underlying discourse about performers/ artists is evidence of a new visual experience and validity. — Suresh Jayaram |
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