Mrinal Dey’s paintings, drawings and sculptures

Artist Mrinal Dey’s new series of paintings, drawings and sculptures on view at Kolkata-based Ganges Art Gallery, are dotted with figures, all, without an exception, depicted in a manner that is eerily grotesque and yet identifiably human.

The sense of self-contentment stemming purely out of a self-centered complacence seeps through, through the smiles pasted on his figures; a smile that more than serves the purpose it was painstakingly designed for – to instilll a sense of disturbance that can somehow jolt us out of an opium-ised slumber. He therefore may be perceived as Alice in more ways than one. Coming from the simple background that he does, this world is an unfamiliar one for him.

In fact, he is therefore lost and dazed and grappling constantly with a reality that he finds difficult to fathom; where therefore his only way out is his brush, his chisel. His wonderland of course takes on a very different hue from that of Alice’s, in that, the magic he encounters is that variant of a dream, he’d rather call a nightmare.

It's only in articulating his trapping in this puzzling, befuddling socio-cultural mire, through his works of art, does he see an escape route. For dreams have always been just that: not just the subliminal creation of a parallel habitation, but the safest womb in which to turn to, to hide, to use as sacred haven. So even though his visuals are not ‘pretty’ by the canons of social aesthetic, they never pretend to be so. The idea for him is to twist and deform his figures, as in a bad dream, as in a tarnished wonderland, so that they function as true mirrors of contemporary predicamnets.

The sensitivity of this artist, a recipient of the Jackson Pollock Grant for 2010, as reflected in his art comes across in the language he chooses to express it. What is refreshing, albeit grim, about the entire oeuvre, is the steadfastness with which he has avoided all sentimental stereotypes, highlighting blatantly, fact of the matter, as it is.