‘Alice in Wonderland’ by Mrinal Dey

For a milieu besotted with the core idea of worshipping thin as aesthetic epitome, artist Mrinal Dey’s figures stand out as garrulously loud, out-of-shape and inflated beyond proportion…

Look closely. No, they don’t appear thinner; for that is not what he wishes you to see. His figures probe deeper into individual and mass mental-scapes to lay bare the effects of consumerism at a level that is all-pervasive. The fixation with all that glitters and the blinkered pursuit of all that the neighbor possesses, has set the fulcrum of modern existence on blingy show-ism.

This has revolutionized the very culture of consumption, leading very often, to a murky bleakness; an inevitable fallout of selfish, inflated egos and life-patterns. Existences have gone from communal to intensely solitary. Mrinal Dey’s figures, which form part of his new series (‘Alice in Wonderland’; Kolkata-based Ganges Art Gallery), symbolize this acute sense of loneliness, lost in a maze of self-inflicted consumerism.

Slits for eyes, bulbous noses, thick-set lips and jaws, a baldness that places the pointedness of the ears in sharp focus and a neck – or the very pronounced lack of it – attaching the large rotund face to a flabby, disproportionate body, highlight Mrinal Dey’s disturbance with the overt emphasis on the usual trappings of post-modern habitation.

The colors he uses are all solid enough to carefully avoid any merging with the textured backgrounds he creates. This solidity enhances the boldness of his figures endowing them with the intended quality of both awe and repulsion. There’s at the same time, a surrealist overtone to his works, as dreams seem to drift in and out of the minds of his central figures, even as they transfix the viewers with their cold hard stares.

This is why newsprints, brown-paper packing boxes and bar-codes recur time and again, in an attempt, to merge the reality of a culture that is made or marred through media hype and publicity, with the concomitant decay of its innate innocence that finds an outlet only through collective nostalgia – one that too has been increasingly tarnished by the grey of existential predicaments.