Discipline and Devotion
 

Pradiptaa can be lush with his spontaneity and can also be rigorously precise as these 6 works demonstrate. In each work, he toys with multi coloured, opaque forms of male and female figures and the avatars of both angels and mythicsymbols, all within a complicatedly patterned mosaic. The women and men while very much part of the romance are exaggerated, sometimes contorted, sometimes even deformed, their hands and feet revealing strength of dynamism rather than ivory satin smooth softness and petite looks as in illustrations across ages.

Pradiptaa’s style of painting , requires equal measures of discipline, gesture and expression in order to execute careful layerings of colour, contour and detail. Compositionally, like miniature paintings these works too convey an extensive display of colourful imagery including, human forms, animals, patterns, and connecting lattice designed painted frames. Miniature paintings often engage in contextual complexities Pradiptaa does the same but creates a mosaic in mythic analogies.

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Throughout the extraordinary realities, of the romances, he demonstrates a marvellous facility for pulling the tradition of miniature paintings into other cultural contexts.

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His forms and figures exhibit a quality of continual translating as imagery is layered, providing a complexity with endless shifts in perception. His complex compositions dismantle hierarchical assumptions and subvert the notion of fixed identity of figures and forms. He also brings home the truth of the depth of relationships; to an ever-changing world where opposing societies interact as in Sahiba Mirza.

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Painting as a Vehicle
 

For Pradiptaa painting is a vehicle for story telling; his repertoire of images is culled from contemporary culture, personal experience, fantasy, mythology, and the popular imaginary of films everything comes together. His drawing practice challenges the conventions of creating human figures. Working with such idioms has allowed the artist to experiment with the technical aspects of drawing on paper as well as the life of drawn forms beyond the surface of the page.

This show demonstrates that we can indeed play with our inherited traditional ways of looking when we find an artist who can transform them elegantly and powerfully with the cultivated facility of his hands and his aesthetics. Ae Mohabbat then is about yesterday, today and tomorrow. It extols the need for love stories in a world torn by terrorism and the toll of the fragmentation of nations that has forgotten simple, human pleasures.
 

UMA NAIR

Curator & Critic