His photo realist images - sharp and edgy, sensual and satirical - are as real as a picture, but as phantasmagorical as a quirky piece of art. They evoke an inward-looking world replete with imagined situations and layers of psychosomatic content.
In a note accompanying the artist’s latest solo show, entitled ‘Room, Interrupted in Passage’ at Mumbai-based GalerieMirchandani + Steinruecke, art critic-scholar Ranjit Hoskote explains how he returns to the interior spaces, which exercise a particular fascination over him: the bedroom, the bathroom and the hotel room, each a space of transient intimacy, each a repository of private and even secret experience rendered curiously, awkwardly public through the gesture of being imaged in a painting.
The writer explains, “An artist of the fraught interval, Abir Karmakar has measured it in various ways in his previous work: as the brief emptiness between exit and entry in the lamplit glow of a room; as the pause between one flamboyant, seductive act and the next in a masquerade of androgynous selves; as the threshold state at which an individual stands besieged by demons, uncertain whether to retreat into enclosure or escape into the open; or as the aftermath of mingled pleasure and regret following transports of passion, surrender or self-revelation.
These rooms, as if caught in an offguard moment, interrupted in passage, are obliged to cast up the mysteries they encode in a peculiar pattern of clues and traces; they resist the probing imagination, to their credit and our surprise. In the gap or lag between what we view and the way we interpret it, which he dramatizes, we discover the subtle moral slippages and psychological shadings, which define us as viewers.
In ‘A Long Whisper’, one of his video works, a solid figure tends to dissolve into shadows and phantoms, imprints itself on a curtain in segments, striations. His ‘Shadows of Distressing Dreams’, on the other hand, features four protagonists, none of them apparently actors, to play their part in an involuntary, unscripted, awkward choreography of sleep, dream, nightmare and wakefulness. Here, too, the artist’s quintessentially painterly approach is evident. Numerous incarnations of these figures surface on the screen, one after another, in successive superimpositions.
In a note accompanying the artist’s latest solo show, entitled ‘Room, Interrupted in Passage’ at Mumbai-based GalerieMirchandani + Steinruecke, art critic-scholar Ranjit Hoskote explains how he returns to the interior spaces, which exercise a particular fascination over him: the bedroom, the bathroom and the hotel room, each a space of transient intimacy, each a repository of private and even secret experience rendered curiously, awkwardly public through the gesture of being imaged in a painting.
The writer explains, “An artist of the fraught interval, Abir Karmakar has measured it in various ways in his previous work: as the brief emptiness between exit and entry in the lamplit glow of a room; as the pause between one flamboyant, seductive act and the next in a masquerade of androgynous selves; as the threshold state at which an individual stands besieged by demons, uncertain whether to retreat into enclosure or escape into the open; or as the aftermath of mingled pleasure and regret following transports of passion, surrender or self-revelation.
These rooms, as if caught in an offguard moment, interrupted in passage, are obliged to cast up the mysteries they encode in a peculiar pattern of clues and traces; they resist the probing imagination, to their credit and our surprise. In the gap or lag between what we view and the way we interpret it, which he dramatizes, we discover the subtle moral slippages and psychological shadings, which define us as viewers.
In ‘A Long Whisper’, one of his video works, a solid figure tends to dissolve into shadows and phantoms, imprints itself on a curtain in segments, striations. His ‘Shadows of Distressing Dreams’, on the other hand, features four protagonists, none of them apparently actors, to play their part in an involuntary, unscripted, awkward choreography of sleep, dream, nightmare and wakefulness. Here, too, the artist’s quintessentially painterly approach is evident. Numerous incarnations of these figures surface on the screen, one after another, in successive superimpositions.
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