In the Twilight Zone
Roobina Karode
Pratul Dash has been preoccupied with the fear and fantasies that accelerate contemporary life, constantly changing it in unwarranted ways.While the artist has been sharpening skills of rendering the painted surface with a seductive realism, he also continues to seek ways and means to address the predicament of living in a precarious world that has pushed itself to the edge. One recalls the monstrous scaffoldings witnessed in his previous works,alluding to mindless urban expansion in the metropolis, capturing views of construction sites that threaten human life and labour.It has been important for the artist to reflect upon and share the implications of a world, not so easy to comprehend and yet surrounding us.
Having migrated from Burla in Odisha (Orissa) to Delhi, Pratul reminisces growing up close to the natural habitat, the Hirakud dam reservoir and mountain ranges where birds and animals co-habited the environment. The lush flora and fauna of his childhood that he left behind,deeply impacted his mind and his artistic quest. The self as protagonist appears at times as an adolescent boy, wearing coloured-paperspecs (sold by the street vendors) carrying his incandescent tree along with him, and at other times, he appears as a witness to the fast disappearing natural habitat around. This recent suite of paintings lure us, the viewers, into landscapes that amplify the twilight zone, situating us in undefined locales, perhaps imaginary sites, to contemplate upon the world that at once seems familiar and yet strange and unsettling in its configuration. Pratul juxtaposes motifs obliquely hinting at depleting resources and waste of water and land, disappearing trees and disoriented animal world.
Against a predominantly low hanging starry night sky,we see the protagonist, at times displaced and on the edge, or with his dog in the light of the twilight, witnessingas if an existential dilemma. Butterflies in the intense blue sky restlessly hover around, disoriented and distraught in the absence of flowers. This is reiterated in a flowerless landscape where lotuses seems to be falling from the sky along with the stars.Theartist turned angel is standing on an unstable platform, with his wings caught in flames. Seeing no escape, he questions his own being. How does one accept what one does not believe in?
The precisely rendered beauty of Pratul’spaintings is in a sense deceptive, as the artist uses the tool of pictorial attraction to enrapture the viewer’s attention, demanding deeper engagement with his concerns through the visual encounter. Employing fantasy-filled imagery from fairy tale books that often spark the imagination of the artist, Pratul presents the intensifying conflict between Nature and the urban world in literal as well as poetic ways.
Trained essentially as a painter, Pratul has also been working with the moving image, as and when he feels a compelling need to choose video as his medium of communication. In his paintings, the pictorial frame often translated into a window to engage an alternate view of reality, the virtuosity of his exceptional skills detailing out the exactitude of everything he painted. He has evolved ways to orchestrate his imagery,pushing his viewers to engage the smallest but pertinent details, sharply placed within the structured composition. Furthering the possibilities of the painted image, Pratul now seems to bring tothe pictorial frame,the experience ofentering a rabbit hole,takingthe viewer into a mysteriouslyuncertain world.
In nocturnaldarkness, we see animals in their alert stance, sensing as if an approaching onslaught of violence or devastation. We encounter a wild goat with unnaturally twisted horns in a dry grassland, while in another our attention is gripped by the jumping deer, suspended in mid-air. The listless body of the deer and the harsh, rocky desecrated landscape below are suggestive of an untimely death. Or then partially sheared, hinting at global consumerism. At times, animals are visible partially as if they are exiting the frame, or the arid landscape,in search for greener pastures.