'Nerve Line of Being' by Samir Aich

New Delhi based Gallery Ensign presents a solo show of artist Samir Aich’s recent works on canvas and paper, entitled ‘Nerve Line of Being’. His new compositions are symptomatic of the tendency among today’s artists to discard the actual evidence of the forces of nature, in order to symbolize, in new ways, the impulses themselves
Poring over his work, one is willy nilly obliged to reflect on the experiences, whether his or his viewers'. This is a dangerous area of interest, one of two errors become more evident: the first - forgetting that viewer) is an experience quite distinct from any other experiences the second - neglecting the requirements that the painting should for the painter and the viewer to be relating it to the same kind of preoccupation with a painting, notes art critic Keshav Malik.

An accompanying note by him elaborates: “By instinct artists protect the ground of their being. So step by step, Samir Aich has refined to a fine point the crude ore of life. It's a job of transmutation, of transfiguration, that of the ordinary, into the extraordinary. Perhaps not all artists are hell- bent upon the same demanding utopia. Samir's spiritual development proceeds from this same sensibility. It does not appear that he uses his sensibility to illustrate any thesis. Art for him is a continuous process of exploration - that of the raw, unworked material of common life -- in special of the locale in which he was born.

For him, ideas are something to impress on a concrete material of sensations, as to mould and manipulate them sensuously. There are, but of course, certain constants, of colors or symbols that have remained intact or almost so with him from the beginning. But these have only led to fresh, new variations. It is so he quite naturally and without undue deliberation goes to the extremes of abstraction but which is still tinged with a certain amount of realism. Such contemporaneous contrasts represent, not a contradiction, but the same, in- born sensibility, reacting with different visual resonances to the given material. Such is quite a bit of the work in the present exhibition.

The so called abstractions, in single, mono color surfaces, are gifted with the barest of signs, geometric lines, or imprints. The net result of all such sparseness, of all such reserve, makes for the badly needed wide open spaces and of a liberated imagination. The work kills noise, kill the din of a crowded planet, it heals.”