“The Linear Matter” has Weighty Mass and a Fourth Dimension!

The newest exhibition at 079 Stories is featuring two artists hailing from Kolkata and Akola/Pune. Showcasing the contemporary works by Saumya Bandyopadhyay – an arts graduate from New Delhi – and Harshit Bondre who trained from Pune, and titled “The Linear Matter”, this show started at the 079 Gallery on Thursday March 30, even as its collateral calendar of art-craft workshops also keeps ticking.

This quiet commencement of the show was followed with a Walk-through with the two artists on Saturday evening, which is when we caught up with the show and the artists, both of whom we found passionately carry and speak of their artistic concepts about ‘mass, objects, backgrounds and the “romance with the fourth dimension in artworks” respectively.

In the twenty minutes-odd Walk-through, both the young artists dwelt upon what triggers and spurs their art – explaining both the content and the craft, which ends up in Saumya’s own words mostly as semi-abstract in his works. So also with Harshit.

Saumya’s present series has studies and portrayals of bulls in various shapes, moods and motions created in various media from charcoals and pencils to dry pastels to acrylic and oil paints on paper and canvas in multiple sizes including the miniature, though all his works could not be included in the display.

For Harshit, it’s the fourth dimension that’s been the key driver having been influenced on this particular aspect in new art by teachers and senior practitioners who he has been interacting with, or whose work he has been seeing of.

Otherwise a keen observer since childhood as per his own understanding, Harshit believes in looking at and appreciating art with “all the five sensory abilities” – smell and taste included.

His eight works or thereabouts that present a feel and finish of geometric compositions or graphs with multiple elements and shapes within the frame – which are like his romance with many things at once- do live up as linear matter in abstract forms; here you have to search for the fourth dimension even as you may wonder what happened to the third? The works are light in colours and feel even as they also tend to be enigmatic due to newer experimentation.

Now living and practicing his art from Ahmedabad, Saumya showcases – as hinted above – an interesting emphasis in his series of bulls and that is about mass and volume of the objects he creates! He creates the ‘mass’ the artist avers, not merely draw the lines! Even on the real side in the instant case, the bulls are a “heavy bundle of mass”, no doubt literally and practically – pun intended – and some of us may know this pretty well from our common experiences, perceptions and images we carry of animal menace on our streets.

Surely we can recall from and relate through this popular imagery from our cityscape, as we find the heavy and obstinate creatures squatting on the roads without any inclination to budge day in and day out. A certain “Billu Saand” who squatted a favourite spot everyday on a certain patch of a road in a certain North Indian city I know of – and actually come from, has gone down as a legend in the local folklore!

To return further to the series of bulls on show by Saumya, while they symbolize mass and motion, they bring a certain kinetics on the canvas to go well and relate with the demands of aesthetic creativity.

Images or paintings of Bulls-in-motion, incidentally, are considered good by Vastu followers for peace, stability and financial prosperity in households (remember the bull at our stock exchange?). The sun sign Taurus represented by the image of a bull also signifies strength of character, informs the artist during his talk.

Manjit Bawa was known for his works centered on bulls – as also cows in some cases- and a certain work by him is popular for the place it enjoys in a top Indian actor’s residence! Picasso also created in 1945 and is remembered for his set of eleven lithographs on and around bulls.

In a couple of large works – one the magnum opus -a diptych- in charcoal and pencils; and the other the second largest in shades of yellow – Saumya draws these bulls as a linear herd that dots and moves up the canvas diagonally from one end to another, right to left or left to right, which then becomes an artistic play against gravity; bulls end up creating a feel of flying up in motion in these interesting works!

No wonder the artist talks about non-Newtonian principles in his own statement about the show!

Overall, an off-beat show, this is on till April 15 on week days between usual working hours.