Idea art

Tanmoy Samanta's works are deceptively simple but layered in meanings.

It’s a dilapidated house, perhaps tilting — leaning forward? — to one side. An ear sticks out of one wall. It’s called Witness, one among several eccentric works that Tanmoy Samanta is showing at Gallery Espace, but as you look at it, you wonder: Is it a play on the house listening in to events that have unfolded, or is it a double entendre on its residents who have witnessed the passage of time and events within its walls? Whose memories are being referred to somewhat ingeniously — those of the house, its residents, other observers — or, as a viewer, is it you?

This involvement in everyday objects comes layered with so many meanings that the apparent simplicity is laughable. A knife pierces through a table (Still Life), part of a daily ritual in the kitchen, but is it just a naïve telling of everyday chores or is there a gorier truth, a more macabre interpretation that you bring to it, again as both observer and viewer? “I build a world of fantasy into the most mundane objects,” agrees Samanta, who says it is his attempt to “unravel the untold story, things that are overlooked”, even if it means “I put stories in the mouths of the objects that I paint.”

Samanta is that anomaly, a painter from today’s generation who has chosen to remain delightfully old-fashioned, a nod to his alma-mater, Santiniketan, from which he gets, he says, his sense, and colour, of the subdued, the calm. “I use gouache and an indigenous rice paper” — he eschews other “upmarket, trendy mediums” — and sees in it a role-playing that is important to him. “I layer from darker to lighter colours,” he explains, “I see it as a process of being frozen in time, of layered meanings that are hidden, but can be discovered, as well as the physical process of layering,” a movement then “from turbulence to calmness”.

But within the space of the pared down simplicity are ideas that are gigantic – a city flies away within the delicate outline of a butterfly, cameos of boots are a comment on war, in Chimera, the horse is both real as well as a toy on wheels, but the head, shaped like a revolver, is a chilling reminder of a fragile innocence, of memories that may betray more than a romanticised nostalgia for a past that may hide more than it reveals.

Maybe that comes from Santiniketan too, where he studied during its “transitional period. It is associated with romanticism, but I saw it fading out,” he remembers. But he says he thinks of his work as an anthropological exercise. “My ideas come from daily life – an object or an incident that has remained in the mind. Like a musical sequence, ideas and timelines come together, I strike up conversations with these images, and in so doing I discover stories”. What he leaves unsaid is that these stories come from his world, but also from those of the created objects, as well as the viewers, as a result of which the dynamics keep changing. In each viewing, there are truths and untruths. Is that why he uses humour? “It softens the impact,” he says, because both truths and untruths have the capacity to hurt.

As an observational scientist, Samanta’s big test will come in December when Espace mounts a “large, curated, multi-media” show of his works. Its theme: magic-realism. “It will be a significant show,” he promises. Renu Modi, director of the gallery, says his canvases are like “ideograms”, each of them with its “own unique language”. How that translates into new ideas should be interesting to watch out for.