Deciphering the presence and absence of human body as a conceptual structure

Aicon Gallery recently hosted a solo show, entitled ‘The Morning After’ of artist Abir Karmakar’s most recent works at its New York venue.

Born in Siliguri in 1977, the artist studied at the Faculty of Fine Arts, M.S. University, Baroda (2003), where he was awarded the Gold Medal for Fine Art, Painting, and at B.V.A. Rabindra Bharati University, Kolkata (2001). He has exhibited widely in India and internationally. The current body of work continues to explore the presence and absence of the human body as a conceptual structure.

While his large-scale androgynous self-portraits took center stage and established the notion of presence in his prior work, his scenes of recently vacated hotel rooms locate their human presence through its deliberate and conspicuous absence.

Two ingeniously crafted single and multiple channel videos that accompanied the exhibition set the tone for the viewer’s complete engagement with the work. His dexterous superimposition of images, gleaned from footage of three individual sleeping figures obtained over a period of three separate nights, suggested more than what meets the eye. Evocative of sexual play and titillation, these tableaus compelled the observer to weave their own version of what might have transpired through the night.

In a series of eleven masterfully rendered and often monumentally-scaled oil paintings, Abir Karmakar’s highly realistic images of empty hotel rooms were charged with the tactile signs of human presence and intimacy. The creased sheets, rumpled blankets and indexical marks of body shapes on the pillows spurred on our imagined recreations of prior human dramas into realms of perception far deeper and more evocative than the simply visual.

For the artist, the stark absence of any human form lends these scenes a powerful and almost extrasensory reminiscence of such, through which we come to perceive the rooms themselves as extensions of their human occupants. This heightened sensorial engagement of the viewer through associative forms is central to his theme of an impersonal space that has been transformed by our constructed recollections into a host for subjective memory.