Dash Dilemma & Designs
Archana B Sapra
Pratul Dash, the man, has traversed from his native village in Orissa to India’s capital city Delhi, making brief forays onto the world stage, while his art seems to have gone through a parallel journey from semi-realistic surrealist work around issues of displacement and migration to built structures and urbanization and increasingly now environment and ecology. The dilemma of man versus environment and attendant socio political currents run through all his artistic creations as he continues to dabble in- painting, photography, sculpture, collage, installation, performance art, video and mixed media work. The artist’s oeuvre in a mix of rural and urban appears rooted in a juxtaposition of the local with regional and national as well as global in its design and essence.
In his most recent suite of work held at Sarah Khan Contemporary Art, Schaan in Switzerland, Pratul makes a leap in experimenting with style, imagery and palette focusing more closely on the dilemmas that continue to preoccupy his mind and engage his art. He revisits familiar sites to create an imaginative space and design a format where history and memory intermingle into his subject matter and plot. His interest as an environmental activist is seen to converge with his artistic oeuvre as he begins to dig into his own experiences, exploring the present and making futuristic predictions like a story teller who foretells the inevitable doom though often couched in sublime and pleasantly painted or animated imagery endowed with an aesthetic appeal.
The artist’s ability to dream and create a world with new realities is illustrated in his painting titled ‘Spilled Water’. There is a coalition of the old with the new going back and forth in time and frame across socio-economic-cultural-political dilemmas to explore and address issues that are universal and confront us all in the current illustrations. The video work is as an interesting extension and continuation of his thrust in paintings on environment where his grand narrative investigates the nuances of fast depleting natural resources.
The degradation of values is critiqued in the work entitled ‘Burning Angel’. The ripples of modernity and modernization are highlighted in most of the works which is a common thread/feature that runs through and underlines his journey as he examines life in contemporary metropolis situated amidst an environment in peril. “Within the aesthetic and conceptual framework that I have been engaged in the past few years, I explore here a new vista, a new territory, of human condition that is rapidly transforming in the complex and distressing process of urbanization”, says the artist about his work. Pratul’s practice as an environmentalist and a painter has been rooted in his understanding of man and ecology. Constantly delving into such issues, he vocalizes his ideas through muted images and silent spectators that are recurrent features of his style and oeuvre.
There are engaging paintings and drawings in his anatomy series in the show that are somewhat somber, sensitive and minimalistic while also very provocative and effective. The spinal cord a vital part of the human structure, a recurring feature in the series that keeps the body erect appears paralyzed just as our society seems to crumble under socio political economic pressures. Pratul reminisces over the numerous atrocities and imbalances in our system, society, environment in an anecdotal and contemporary context. Nostalgia and past history from around the globe such as – Hitler’s Gas chambers or Mayawati with scales of justice in one hand and her ‘infamous’ hand bag in the other, inspired by a media story, wrapped in floral patterns, add a layer of irony while also giving a healing touch. Exaggerated decorative elements are added as a contrast in the imagery to soften the blow for the viewer as well as the artist himself who goes through the pain and anguish as he mulls over the idea and then goes though the process of rendering- peeling off the skin to expose the skeleton, burning and punching holes in the body/paper. At another level the holes in the imagery are also suggestive metaphorically of the loop holes that our current system is plagued with.
The artist fashions a tactile interplay of spaces to create an illusion of three-dimensional angle even in his two dimensional work. Burning wings of the angel with melting bricks in one of his works and the overflowing frothy polluted water with scared birds in flight and a patch of green in the background in another, are all suggestive of the serious threats to the humanity as well as the environment that manmade disasters bring as civic systems begin to break down and social patterns start to disintegrate. Pratul interrogates the dilemma that societies undergoing transition invariably encounter, ranging from degradation of human values to global warming, religious sectarianism and homogenization, vertical growth within a limited horizontal space as infrastructure begins to crack, civic systems start to fail and environment gets threatened. The paintings (Sqmm. Sqcm. Sq inch) also make telling narratives around the big Indian metros vying to turn global, lost in a consumerist ethos, greed and hurry to expand beyond their own limits, as they continue to engulf smaller cities and villages around along with the inhabitants and their culture.
Much of Pratul’s work is marked for its personalized and experiential trigger juxtaposing past with the present. The carefree simplicity of his childhood experiences coupled with atrocities prevalent in rural backyards of India, the intrigue and struggles of life in big metros all figure in his work in one form or another whatever the media. But it is more so in his video work where he himself enacts the protagonist’s role, trying to unpack the paintings also featured in the same exhibition. Pratul’s video work ‘Landscape’ is a blend of his two paintings-‘Conch Blower’ and ‘Man with a camera’. The experimental video uses animation as a tool, simple yet extremely effective. A picturesque landscape complete with abundant greenery is evoked vide a flowing stream with litter as well as a rainbow, both as coherent parts of the environment. The flocking birds enter the landscape and you can almost hear the pleasing sound of the stream flowing in the background. The artist as a photographer/ researcher enters the scene followed by the conch blower which Pratul resurrects from his childhood memory as he recalls the Brahmin priest who blew his conch every morning in his native village. In a subtle and soft manner, the idyllic landscape is transformed into a barren land spewn with dead matter and creepy insects as the only survivors. One does not even realize when this transformation has taken place. The stream is slowly receding almost eaten away by the muck and dirt. The birds seem to disappear into the gloomy sky and life fades away. The ‘fertility of capital’ seems to have overridden the ‘fertility of land.’
Architectural features and scaffoldings of urban structures markers of his earlier work are drawn and painted with a fresh nuance in his current series. The houses and buildings in the imagery are devoid of any ceilings as life moves in and around the space at a slow pace with a rare appearance of a human figure, with face almost hidden trying to avoid seeing the reality and engrossed in mundane everyday routine. A contrast of sorts is offered by making selective use of glitter in a few of the mixed media works. There are birds or animals too as circumstantial witnesses in the form of a dead horse or dead fish in the pond or the flying creatures that endow his work with a surrealist air. For Pratul the idea or the concept behind an art work is the most important aspect of his creations that figure as paper works, drawings, paintings and video art in the current repertoire. A meticulous planner, whose compositions make clever use of the negative spaces to formulate some hard hitting statements about contemporary dilemma and realities of life, seems to prefer a somewhat minimalistic style and design working in a soft tone. His skill seems to lie in conveying complex issues in a subtle manner.