Beena Pradhan displays a strange fascination for lowly music-makers and sellers of inexpensive instruments, on urban streets, and sometimes also for lazy casual listeners. As if to compensate for the poor quality of their 'art' the subaltern music-makers try to put up gallant spectacles with weirdly stitched-up lurid dresses and equally garishly coloured and glistening much abused instruments. The rehearsed seriousness of their physical postures and gestures seen when they play, hold for Beena an attraction in a strange way. Her close observation makes her see beyond the skin, so to say, what the onlookers do not see in passing. She perhaps also hears sound beyond the decibels produced, that suggestion is there in her paintings. Beena, in most of her present crop of acrylics on canvas, presents what she sees and feels, beyond what the passing onlookers see, gloss over and do not empathise with. Beena's use of overwhelming somber and cool hues with occasional flashes of bright whites and yellows (without any touch of warm colour) bring out, closely viewed parts of the bodies and the instruments of the music-makers indicated by definitional lines, from darknesses, that envelop their lives, into momentary flashe of public glare. Beena's palette throws light on music performing body parts, in their relationships with the instruments and occasion-demanding accessories. The in-focus, linearly delineated body-parts, blowing lips and pressed lips, flayed nostrils and flattened noses, inward looking closed eyes of morose beings and astonished or stricken eyes of unpleasantly surpriseds, flayed palms and clutching palms, forward and backward bends of bodies with loads of instruments-of-earning through 'art', seem to tell pathetic tales of the lives of these street performers, however, not without a sardonic touch of farce; the farce of making 'art', a means of earning and the realization of the impossibility of the effort. This is perhaps an over-reading of Beena's intention (which art scribes often indulge in when they get fascinated). She is perhaps not as moved by the state of the lowly music-makers' being, or even by musings on relation between art and earning as by the problem of construction of sensuous entities with flat masses of colours and lines, on frame-bound two dimensional surfaces, wherein remnants of recognizable images serve only as take-off strategies, so popularised by the post-war School of Paris, and so successfully adapted by a celebrated Kolkata painter. Beena's severe fragmentation of closely seen decontextualised figures and objects, and splashing of non-representational colour masses on pictorial plane, seem to confirm the perception that her prime intention is to objectify an all embracing gloom relieved only by occasional flashes of brightness that the shattered lives experience. — SPranabranjan Ray Kolkata 25 September 2006   NEXT>>