About Subrata
‘My Travel Stories'
Please view the PDF for Blaise-Cendrars-Exhibition-Brochure
Subrata Ghosh likes to speak about painting in terms of an unending series of disinterred, metamorphosed images, signs, symbols having their origin in archetypal forms of objects and concepts. His pictorial constructs tend to span a world of forgotten language and the contemporary reality of the eye. Often they seem to simulate in psychic aesthetic terms a resurgence of epic or mythical archetypes that rise or descend in the shape of bubbles encapsulating brittle and splintered narratives struggling to relate themselves to the fleeting present. The heretical painter is thus compelled to communicate with others as well as himself in a twilight idiom, if only to describe the reality of the phenomenalism he is trying to unravel.
The fractured, albeit undying, ethos of the prehistoric man surfaces in myriad evanescent shapes in such works of the artists as recaptures the heroic (or mock heroic) ego of Duryodhan vanquished in an unfair duel on the banks of Daipayan lake. Here we can retrieve the abstract timeless wreckage of the human spirit long-embedded in the collective memory of a story-loving people .Closer to our time and in a different manifestation of the human ego, the reality of the eternal myth of Don Quixote would similarly seem to build a bridge between the primordial man and his unending progeny. Subrata Ghosh is an explorer and veritable excavator in the labyrinthian space where myths pregnant with meaning remain hidden under layers and layers of time—time’s mute yet gestural footprints. And in his voyage through the labyrinth of relics and wreckages, the avid traveler-artist of today is continually impelled to resurrect fragments of animal bones waiting, as it were, to be related and reincarnated into some relevant myth, or perhaps to discern in a fossilized leaf vein or petrified remains of pre-Deluge forests, the present day omens of a gathering environment disaster, In these paintings, subterranean symbolic forms and shapes tend, once again, to mingle with cognizable objects to conjure up the complex continuum of interpenetrating epochs. The wandering artist chances upon splintered skeletons of once mighty animals now strewn over obscure reaches of some faraway desert and is driven by intuition to arrange them in the shape of Dadhichi’s rib-bones which instantly evokes the spectacle of a ten-armed Durga.
Small wonder, the painter, gifted with a visual idiom all his own, is under no compulsion to separate the abstract from the figurative. If anything, he is seen for a split second as a spectator taking a dispassionate look at his own discovery of interactive images culled both from the visible present and the hoary past. The much traveled artist has touched life in the raw, no matter whether as a near solitary dweller in a tiny, phantasmagoric Mediterranean island, or as one engaged at his studio easel. The quest has always been the same—to find a private language that could relate himself to his experimental world of imagery.
Samir Dasgupta
(The Telegraph)
Nature Lover and Artist
Subrata Ghosh, in his recent paintings, explores and retrieves the innumerable layers of existence of human being. Actually between surface and depth of human consciousness there are numerous stages of chiaroscuro, countless enigmatic processes of transformation that guide the development of his/her inner being. One of the aspirations of art, particularly in modernist and post-modern stages, is to decipher that complex intangible liminal zone of consciousness and to create a tangible form out of that process. Form does not merely reflect the external appearance of reality, but constructs a critique of it to have a glimpse of the truth contained in it. Truth is never a constant, immutable condition of nature or its being. It has its own mystery that is regulated by the spatio-temporal condition of human existence as a social being. Subrata tries to delve deeper into that mystery to create a metaphor out of the multifarious allegory that the existential process continuously bestows. Allegory has its own conundrum. Subrata tries to realize that puzzle and extract images and forms out of that.