Starry images from silver screen draw a new aesthetic and cultural meaning

Artist Vinita Dasgupta has dedicated herself to a quest for a surrealist imagery that can carry the freight of her early memories, cultural space, realism, of living in a city, a politico-social conditioning, a politics of identity, culture and language and above all an inner silence that pervades our existence.

And yet, her works have never been nostalgic hymns to an existential epoch rather her aim has been to inhabit, and share with the viewer, a pictorial space that is ever-renewed. Her new body of work on view at New Delhi-based Art Konsult has resulted from a piling up of images from a huge corpus of Indian Cinema bringing in an ambivalent language that facilitates the seizure of aesthetic and cultural meaning.

The series, entitled 'Rustic Reveries of Bollywood' communicates the parable of a world where the close-ups of its members are mere overlapping of an individual’s close- up but an overview of a situation – a rare gesture. Here, Vinita Dasgupta pays tribute to film noir.

The subjects of this series are the glamorous actresses of popular films made in Bombay that is crucially located in the terrain of culture that the nation, as an imagined community in these spaces, is most powerfully articulated into existence. The significance of Mumbai’s cinematic idiom, from this perspective, lies in the fact that it represents the hegemonic vocabulary of cultural terrain in Indian.

Through portraits of leading actresses of mainstream Hindi cinema and image from pin up girls of yesteryears and those today, along with movie posters, she focuses on cultural icons that cut across regional and national boundaries resulting in a new class of popular cultic, eclectic and visual imagery. On the other hand, posters of popular films that is crucially located in the terrain of culture that the nation, as an imagined community in these spaces, is most powerfully articulated into existence.

Her work is figurative and illuminated; it never gives itself away though as external sign- rich in privacy and inwardness. Some of the digital photographic images transferred on to the canvases here are replete with images of a world that substitutes the external one translating feeling and emotions into a visual language.