Metroscape

April 3, 2000

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Taste of Togetherness

The Movie Review

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Young Ones

A bus ticket, a Coke can, a cheap film poster. Is this what art is coming to? Why not, say a bunch of young artists currently showing at Calcutta's Galerie 88 ... if that's life, let art show it. The exhibition also shows the making of a bold new genre of 30-somethings who take a critical view of life through their works. This untitled group show is all about looking into the mind of the '90s artist. The seven painters largely concern themselves with the "secondary image" -- visuals that are used to plug consumer products and their influence on people's minds. So there's Debraj Goswami's acrylic-on-paper throwbacks to Bollywood, a set of six works called "Pretension" that dwell on the seamier side of films and could easily pass off as posters for a C-grade flick; and Rajarshi Biswas' Attesting my Last Memory, a tribute to the rubber stamp.
This exhibition is also a method for studying changing techniques, says art historian and curator of the show, Pranab Ranjan Ray. He notices traces of pop art combined with Latin American Magic Realism that percolated to India in the late '70s. "The artists pick up random objects representative of the consumer age, and take a tangential look at them," says Ray. For them, it's got to be the Big Picture, or nothing at all.

-Labonita Ghosh

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