The Telegraph
THE WORLD IN A CANVAS
Adheesha Sarkar
Visual Arts
The show, Aviskar 2012: East meets West (January 6-22), at Gallery Gold is the seventh one of the annual exhibitions of the Aviskar series that started in 2006. These shows have been held in London, Sussex and Utrecht in the Netherlands, as well as in Calcutta. This year, the exhibition brings together the works of 33 artists from 11 countries.
Not only did the exhibition present a wide variety of artists but it also covered a diverse range of styles —from 18th-century Dutch techniques to the Bengal School to the abstract and impressionist to digital and graphic art. Works of senior artists such as Ramananda Bandyopadhyay, Jogen Chowdhury, Wasim Kapoor, Christian Schutz, Alexander Tokarev, Jan Teunissen and Manas Roy shared the walls of the gallery with those of newcomers like Andreas Schubert, Dripta Roy, Dita Luse and Lynne Davies.
Presentation is a crucial factor in shows of this scale. Gallery Gold, in spite of having a fairly large exhibition hall equipped with the basic facilities, failed to make the show look grand. Space was no doubt a constraint. But the presentation was slipshod. Two paintings from Wasim Kapoor’s Christ series were left on the floor. Those on the walls were haphazardly arranged, as if in a great hurry.
Despite the lacklustre presentation, the exhibition had much in store. On the one hand, one got to see the works of trendsetters like Wasim Kapoor, Jogen Chowdhury, Teunissen and Tokarev. On the other hand, there were the fresh works from Germany, Austria, Turkey, the Netherlands, Latvia and Belgium, among other countries. The promises were many. This ensured a tough competition for the viewer’s attention among the paintings.
The work of Dripta G. Roy, an Indian artist based in the United Kingdom now, stood out starkly. His graphic art creates a number of layers; sometimes they seem to merge and at other times, they quarrel violently. He creates a riot of fluorescent colours and controls their movement judiciously. Dita Luse of Latvia made a subdued appeal through a nostalgic interplay of light and shade. The angular patterns on her canvas, inspired by motifs from medieval floors, teased out the third dimension.
The portraits by Maaike Snellen Semeijn from the Netherlands tried to tell stories. Painted in glum colours, they were deceptive — passion seemed to fume beneath the gloom. The serene oil pastels of Astrid Aigner from Austria were quaint and gripping. And the innate dreaminess of Floosie in Blue by Lynne Davies from the UK reminded one of Toulouse-Lautrec’s Moulin Rouge paintings. Other treats included Schutz’s candid experiments with digital art, the wistful beauty of Teunissen’s oils and Manas Roy’s monochromatic wonders. For such a show, the title, East meets West, sounds inadequate.