The show titled Convergence showcases three remarkable artists, spaced out slightly in age but contiguous in terms of an assured conviction. The shared conviction lies in their approach to visual language, in their visual processing and in their faith in drawing the fundamentals grounded in a larger conceptual mooring. The convergence takes place also in their conviction to foreground the communicative efficacy of marks, lines, dots and textures – all in black and white (with very few exceptions). Circumventing the representational trappings, all these three artists, explore the flip side of representations, in somewhat characteristic ways. While Surajit Biswas disbands the idea of representation by deploying a plethora of unidentifiable marks to reshape themselves, Tapati Chowdhury delves deep into the form, excavating, as it were, the anatomy of essential. Debnath Basu on the other hand, creates a quasi-narrative visual diatribe, sneering at the limits of language as well as human idiocies.

Debnath, the senior-most artist in this show has been engaged in developing a subversive visual strategy invoking irreverence, vitriol, satire and ironic. His idiom is quirky, eccentric yet subtle and meticulous like an engraver.

Tapati, driven by the search for the inherent and her passion for the contour, reconstructs her notion of aesthetics built within any mundane object. Strong contouring makes her images profound in their vital existence, buried deep inside their material presence.

Surajit, the youngest in this group, crawls with his marks creating the most unsuspecting void that sustains as well as challenges the formation. Conglomeration of his marks and dots and strokes after a certain point seem to emerge from the space created by this process. His abstraction borders on enigma.

Soumik Nandy Majumdar