;“…..Samindranath Majumdar is emerging as a fine abstractionist, whose brooding, low-toned constructs speak of a mature sensibility. Reinventing natural views in terms of lines and segments, textures and grades is part of an established genre, explored by a discerning few here. Although belonging to this category Majumdar is nobody’s shadow.” What is particularly to be noted is his refusal to allow decorative concessions to make the works pleasing. The diagrammatic layouts are like aerial views at times but are not flat or static, for the artist can evoke teasing illusions of depth and motion, vacuum and volume, even with a restrict motion, vacuum and volume, even with a restricted color scheme. ; Rita Dutta
The Economic Times of Kolkata
Saturday, 21 June 1997
Metro Magazine ; ;;;;;| ; Reconstructing empty space | ;;| ; VISUAL ARTS | ;;| ; SAMIR DASGUPTA | ;;| ; ;
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;;;;| ; | ;;| ; Mental picture: Desolate by Samindranath Majumdar | ;;| ; | ;Abstractionism in art is a many-faceted, non-interpretative designing of colours, lines and shapes. Laid out in the the non-formal syntactical sequence in space, the resulting pictorial conglomeration is supposed to evoke a variety of feelings, memories and excitement, and an awareness of the human condition — all from a personal perspective. ;Samindranath Majumdar, although a thorough-going abstract visualiser, is in the respectable company of abstractionists the world over in the sense of being preoccupied with reconstructing (or even deconstructing) empty space. But his role as a painter has no artificiality or external semblance with the fashionable genres of abstract art having their cultural roots in the West. The point needs underlining in the overwhelming context of near-mimicry of fashionable occidental art practices that have little or no significance in the Indian context. Samindranath’s space is a mental space, described by his personally felt experience, if only tinged by his own imagination. His field of vision, not unexpectedly, is lyrical and romantic and so involves a historical link between the past and the present. His effort to reconstruct space in terms of non-objective objects is not prejudiced or doctrinally circumscribed by any laboured process of eliminating every vestige of cognisable objects that truly have already gone into the weaving of his tapestry-like surface. From some angles, Samindranath’s conception of pictorial forms awakens us, once again, to the fact that all abstractionists belong in a fundamental way to the tenuous borderline between the figurative/ identifiable and the non-representational. The narrative element latent in all pictorial constructs (not excluding Jackson Pollock’s so-called action painting which is supposed to have contained the totemic myth) is arguably inalienable from the ‘pure design’ configurated in space. The exhibits range from landscapes involving truncated shapes of identifiable objects (painted in acrylic), at one end, to a series of mixed-media (marble dust, rice paper on canvas) creations, at the other. | THE TELEGRAPH ,CALCUTTA, Friday, April 01, 2005 ; ; ;“These works evoke the flat still lives of Braque in which he created ‘tactile space’ which, by the closing in of the background, brings the objects nearer to eye. This then counters the flatness by bringing the images into a tangible relief. The artist plays with the idea of space around objects and how they relate to the space in a way that disorientates the viewer and forces us to look more closely at what the painting is visually saying to us. Echoing something of the philosophy of the cubism; that is was not a manner but a state of mind” ;.“At the time when here in England our biggest art prize, The Turner Prize has been characterized by conceptual installations and videos, painting seems to have become a lost art form, or at least one that has lost its ability to communicate to its audience. Turner one of the gretest western Landscapes painters certainly have been confused by the work that the prize championed. It is therefore a relief to know that contemporary artists such as Samindranath are finding ways to talk to us through painting in a way which helps us to understand and explore the unsettled landscapes in which we all live.” ; Lowena Faull 2004.
Freelance Writer and Art Promer.
Exeter, England. ; |