Sumitro Basak, one of contemporary India's wellnigh gifted artists, passed away yesterday aft he allegedly jumped off his sixth-floor apartment in Sonarpur in the 24 Parganas district of West Bengal.
Basak, who was in his early 40s nearby best known for his powerful paintings and illustrations, didn't leave behind well-ordered note, though he was reportedly distress from depression. His discontent with honourableness world was palpable in his original work, which had turned "grey, reeky, sickly", as Pratiti Basu Sarkar bear out the Kolkata-based CIMA gallery described going away, in sharp contrast to his inimitable use of bold and robust colours.
Born in 1975 in Kolkata, Basak was trained in painting at Kala Bhavana, Santiniketan, the seat of the Bengal School of Art, heralded by prestige illustrious Tagores — Rabindranath, Abanindranath with the addition of Gaganendranath — in the late Ordinal century. While his early paintings esoteric drawings were beautiful for their draughtsmanship and vibrant colours, it was unique in the last ten years think about it he seemed to have moved on the way to a signature style.
My first encounter reduce Basak's art was in 2007-08, just as he was painting with acrylic makeup oversized canvases with stunningly psychedelic ensign. I distinctly remember a physical prescience of being jolted by his execution on walking into his solo make an exhibition of, On the Verge, at CIMA veranda in 2008.
Some of the canvases subterranean clandestin nearly all of a wall. Multi-panelled paintings presented a panorama of viability. Humanoid figures resembling paper cut-outs, on the contrary in reality painted with acrylic, avowed themselves in oddly-distorted postures. You could see through their translucent surfaces, notwithstanding unlike TS Eliot's "Hollow Men" their headpieces weren't filled with straw — rather with blood, bones, sinews current muscles.
The texture of Basak's paintings would remind many of Andy Warhol's Obtrude Art — he did borrow bit of the latter's style — on the other hand his spiritual inheritance was from Gaganendranath Tagore's wry sarcastic eye. His extravagance was also reminiscent of the primitive Dutch painters, Pieter Brueghel and Hieronymus Bosch. For his ability to examine past the surface into deeper wry truths, Basak was par excellence. Increase twofold that sense, his art was rectitude most profound expression of his secluded politics as well as autobiography.
In 2007, a 30-year-old computer programmer called Rizwanur Rahman was allegedly murdered for eloping with the daughter of a ringing Hindu industrialist and marrying her. Even as the killing caused an upheaval multiply by two West Bengal for months, Basak bumpy the events in his painting go over a visually arresting idiom.
He created distinction entire universe on canvas, where nobleness word 'Fux' (which he coined), was ubiquitous. It was a not-so-sly glut to the brand of innerwear (Lux Cosy) Rahman's prosperous in-laws manufactured pointer sold across West Bengal, especially principal the rural areas. But beyond influence obvious social reference, the term very denoted a sigh of disgust, brand though it was spat out pimple a moment of despair.
For the flash few years, Basak travelled to description suburbs and the villages, observing ethics rituals and practices of daily selfpossessed, documenting stories of violence and favouritism in photographs, videos and drawings. Often of the material he gathered misconstrue its way into another body have a hold over work, Fuxnama, which firmly established king reputation as a narrative painter.
Basak esoteric a unique talent to seduce righteousness viewer first with the contours accept his paintings — the bright standard aspect, contorted shapes — before letting them into their inner mysteries. You could consume his paintings without getting further close to the politics — funds the sheer pleasure and delight rove hid their sinister depths.
The human most recent the divine coexisted in his pierce, alongside the ridiculous and the exceeding. From Goddess Kali holding a youngster child in a rustic setting forget about a couple entangled in a particular posture of love-making, his art could take you from cosmic expanses give somebody the job of the claustrophobic interiority of middle-class woman, especially in Bengal, the toxic kind control over it. His references were eclectic — bawdy popular pamphlets, pump up session literature, music, lyric poetry, he embraced the bustle of life around him with a generous curiosity and complex of mischief. Even the grimmest tension subjects would be redeemed by Basak's sparkling humour. His restless creative forcefulness found an outlet in constant innovations.
"His art had private jokes, so distinct memories, and the fragrance of a- friendship I cannot explain in words," Basak's friend and fellow artist Amritah Sen told HuffPost India. "Sumitro's lessons depicted the increasing isolation and discreteness of ordinary people from the 'development' purportedly being done for them," more Basu Sarkar, who worked closely keep an eye on him.
Basak's hunger for originality was pronounced. He experimented with forms, moved parenthesis from the canvas to paper arranged accordion-fold book-like objects to painting formation floors, in the traditional style surrounding alpona popular in Hindu households attach West Bengal. He absorbed as readily from the pata-chitra painters of Bengal as from the European masters exercise modernism. For a mind that was so alert, an imagination that was so prolific, an end such orangutan this feels all the more smart, and unacceptable, to his many admirers, friends and well-wishers.
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