PORTRAITS IN TIME
TANMOY SAMANTA Text by Veeranganakumari Solanki Jamwal
PORTRAITS IN TIME TANMOY SAMANTA Produced by
F35/36 Dhanraj Mahal, CSM Marg, Apollo Bunder, Colaba, Mumbai 400001. www.tarq.in Artworks by Tanmoy Samanta Designed by Anugraha studioanugraha.com
Text by Veeranganakumari Solanki Jamwal
Portraits in Time
Tanmoy Samanta | Intoduction
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INTRODUCTION Tanmoy Samanta’s second solo exhibition at TARQ carries works created by the artist over the last two years. In keeping with his distinctive aesthetic of clean lines and muted, stone-like colours, Samanta has continued to use a motley collection of found objects – protractors, stencils, pins and a faux fur in his work, which, together with his tempera and mixed media allow a turn towards the uncanny and surreal.
memory and recall. The portraits, which individually define their specific subjects, envelop seemingly inconsequential and banal objects in a much wider context. The objects become “witnesses”; receptacles of memories that travel through the folds of time and space. Samanta imbues the uncanny imagery with symbolism that travels from the universe of the frame to the field of vision of the viewer.
Samanta uses portraiture – a theme steeped in historical tradition – in order to delve into time and its impact on
Hena Kapadia, Gallery Director, TARQ
Tanmoy Samanta | Essay
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of commoditisation during a demand for excess.
PORTRAITS IN TIME - Essay by Veeranganakumari Solanki Jamwal
A portrait is a story of time depicted by its subject. Portraiture, one of the foremost forms of art that illustrated the personal lives of people is also a medium of history to understand power, religion, politics, status and aspects of an era through the portrayed objects and lifestyles. In almost every visual art form – from drawing, painting, printmaking, sculpture and coin reliefs, to photography and the most experimental contemporary art works – the theme of portraiture has been a constant. The manner in which portraits were perceived and depicted, adapted with the period they were created in and thereby identified time and places. The Renaissance period is crucial while exploring the manner in which time changed portraiture. During the Renaissance, artists experimented with mediums and subject matter to further evolve the portrait. Subjects
were originally depicted against plain backgrounds. This changed, as additional props and references to their lifestyles began to be featured alongside to convey their status in society, their profession or passion. Through association with the surroundings, portraits extended beyond just simple depictions to those around which stories could be woven. The post-impressionist artists such as Matisse, Munch, Picasso and Schiele explored a different direction of portraiture in the early 20th century. They focused less on replicating what was before them and more on aspects of personality, character and inner psyche of the represented subject through colour and form with psychological references. Popular culture in the 1960s saw artists such as Warhol and Lichtenstein popularising the portrait with the idea
Tanmoy Samanta’s works hark back to several art historical references along with his in-depth knowledge and study of art history and literature. His works bear references to the Fluxus movement, the Bauhaus, Dadaist works, Japanese prints, the coexistence of interiors and exteriors in Indian miniature paintings, the literary works of Kafka and Marquez, and the study of signs and symbols to discover alternate meanings. Samanta’s works are also strongly influenced by cubism and surrealism where simple forms, monochromatic colours, and fantasy prevailed. His influences from Indian art history are derived from the 18th – 19th century Company School, the Bengal School and the Santiniketan School of painting, from where he adopted the technique of opaque watercolours. This is evident in the artist’s use of gouache and the mysterious transluscent layers in his work that leave the viewer searching deeper in the hope to discover more. In relation to these aspects, Samanta’s portraits bear an almost anthropologic reference with the use of sculptural elements along with painting. The artist’s tendency to use readymade objects seeped in with his experimental book sculptures inspired by synthetic cubism. The series began in 2014 when Samanta’s father, a schoolteacher, started separating the books that had lost their
relevance in the age of the Internet. Samanta retained a few books, and experimented with giving them a new identity. He describes the book sculptures as an extension of his paintings. Inspired by Anselm Kiefer’s book sculptures on civilisation, war and violence, Samanta’s sculptures turn instead towards a personal monologue with world sorrow. The process of creating these sculptures makes them appear like books from the outside but open up to reveal another universe inside, both literally and visually. In Document (2016), a pair of lungs merges with the network of threads and stitched lines that bind the book, while Night Eyes (2016) and Relic (2016) are visions into time and fossils from the past. The Banned Book (2016) is warned off by thin, sharp razor blades –- questioning the content, or perhaps the object itself. Samanta treats a portrait as an ambiguous object of inquiry rather than a piece of information or representation. His works generate questions, construct meanings and delve into details that may often be overlooked at a superficial level. The imagery of his work and subjects is borrowed from his surroundings that further take on another meaning of exploring their world with reference to their connections with the personal and public. The artist presents the portrait of the material world through banal objects, thereby teasing the minds of viewers to look beyond the literal, and into inner appearances and passages
Portraits in Time
of the mind. Similar to the contours of time, the definitive form of the portrait constantly shifts. With his preference to create a language of solitude and reflection, Samanta attempts to redefine portraiture. Drawing from the known and the unknown, from memory and from imagination, the artist’s host of isolated images, narrate in minimal depictions, the tales of time, objects, motives and consequences. Through the Still Life series of portraits, the artist not only attempts to characterise objects similar to the style of portraiture but also relooks at the manner in which still-life can be depicted. Borrowing from the ‘Stream of Consciousness’, what one sees here is similar to the way in which our thoughts travel –- without the links and references that bind patterns, and without the flow of associations and references in verbal dialogues or conversations, the connections are events occurring in our minds. Unrelated objects come together to create a frame. The objects’ monologues are associated with their memories of time, travel and spaces. They are witnesses of occasions and have associations with someone’s life events. They could be heirlooms -- abandoned, lost or misplaced items carefully preserved in a fold of memory. In The Telephone for instance, the real and the surreal become united with the fish sitting quietly in place of the receiver, disconnecting connectivity to create a sound lapse. The Pot, a rather evocative
Tanmoy Samanta | Essay
work, draws its ancestry from the artist’s family home, where his grandmother fed a crow with the belief to serve her parents. It is that fold of memory from the artist’s mind that opens up to viewers. Similarly, other objects from this series reside in the minds of their past and are presented here with an opportunity to enter another’s memory with time. Though tempera is Samanta’s primary medium for his paintings, he has experimented with diverse materials. The mediums Samanta selects for his works are often metaphors and objects that contribute to understanding the sculpted or painted portrait. They are articles collected from the past. During the course of the artist’s work, these mediums have suddenly found meaning and a unique lineage is conjured with the subject. The rendition of material by the artist leads to surreal compositions of portraits waiting to be discovered. His inclination towards objects related to study and exploration is evident through the use of the protractor and maps. These make an appearance from Samanta’s old geometry and geography books, while frozen narratives and distant memories surface through animal imagery, fur, metal pins, stencils and other objects. Protracted thoughts of the artist bear the appearance of studies and conversations in a set of protractor portraits. These thoughts are measured, weighed and delivered with a degree and structure of
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understanding the angles of his portrait series. The geometric abstraction of the protractor metaphorically suggests degrees in memory and universality. While discussing images as a specific entity, Jacques Ranciére referred to them as an object of a twofold question – of origin and of the end purpose; uses that they are put to, and what they consequently result in. Samanta, borrowing from this thought, has extended the way in which we look at an image, similar to the manner in which (John) Berger described the way of seeing – “The relation between what we see and what we know is never settled.”
in the artist’s works. In his early work, The Cartographer’s Paradox (2014), Samanta plays the role of a surveyor who morphs the lines dividing continents to create new shapes, boundaries and travel diaries on this unstable earth. The map appears once again in his recent portrait work Scream IV (2016). A direct reference to Edvard Munch’s, ‘The Scream’ (1893), Scream IV, is a reaction to the horrific portrait of the structure of the world and the map dissolving under conflict.
A corresponding set of seven works to the protractor series is reminiscent of forms that appear familiar but cannot easily be identified. This familiarity opens up a new world of discovering, imagining and constructing memories and thoughts. The circular frames derive their form from the faces of the protractor set, similar to an epilogue. The hints of identity that we may claim to know are never confirmed. Some are recognisable suggestions, while others are skewed beyond recognition by thought and time, reminiscing our associations with portraits from various periods.
Describing ‘The Scream’ as the ‘Mona Lisa’ of our times, Samanta was haunted by this work and intrigued by how difficult it is to define our emotions in present times. He created five works in this series, referring to ‘The Scream’ as a symbol depicting anything from cheer or excitement, to anguish, protest, grief or a face-off of emotion and time. Scream I, dominated by fur, is a portrait of a woman with the soft white texture behaving as a metaphor for laughter. The portrait completes itself without any details, but just the suggestion of form. Scream II references Dali and the surreal needles of time, while Scream III becomes the face of time. Virginia Woolf’s, ‘Mrs. Dalloway’ and a ‘Stream of Consciousness’ become the portrait of the vague passage of thoughts in time in Scream V.
Samanta’s favourite possession as a child was the globe. It was like a magicball with all its colours and beautifully complex maps. These maps recur often
Focusing on the way in which mankind is jeopardising his own world, the artist mocks man in Man Pointing (2016). A man sprouting a large brain and an
Portraits in Time
almost non-existent body attempts to pass a needle through a ring, depicting a perpetually useless act being carried out by a fairly powerful and apparently knowledgeable creature. Further referencing the deterioration of his surroundings, Samanta creates a portrait suggesting the perils of nature. The Gas Mask (2016), which would traditionally have been a portrait study of a bird, takes on a new dimension with the bird using a gas mask to filter out the smog and pollution. The skeletal looking gas mark harks extinction. Through this series of portraits, Samanta creates an acceptance of looking at portraiture in a non-traditional manner. He experiments with medium and brings forward icons of time to re-characterise them in a contemporary context. In his works, they depict life, character, thoughts and metaphors. Through manifestation of ideas and experiments, the artist has extended the traditional form of a portrait into the imagined realms of travel, time and imagination with the tales of books, objects and memories.
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Portraits in Time
Scream II | Tempera, metal pins and watch dials on Nepali paper 17 x 20 inches | 2016
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Scream III | Tempera on Nepali paper 14 x 18 inches | 2016
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Scream IV
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Face to Face | Tempera on Nepali paper 24 x 42 inches | 2016
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Document | Watercolour and stitching on Nepali paper 42 x 36 inches | 2015
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Document (Detail)
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Gas Masks | Tempera and watch dials on Nepali paper 17 x 20 inches | 2016
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The Vessel | Tempera on Nepali paper 30 x 42 inches | 2015
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The Padlock | Tempera on Nepali paper 30 x 42 inches | 2014
The Sewing Machine | Tempera and measuring tape on Nepali paper ?? inches | 2015
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The Banned Book
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The Pot | Tempera on Nepali paper 30 x 42 inches | 2015
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Obscure Objects
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Tanmoy Samanta
ABOUT THE ARTIST Tanmoy Samanta born in 1973, Tanmoy Samanta began his artistic journey at the Kala Bhavan in Santiniketan, West Bengal, followed by training at the Kanoria Arts Centre, Ahmedabad. His career has seen a number of solo exhibitions including three with the New Delhi based Gallery Espace and one at Anant Art Gallery, Kolkata. Samanta’s show at TARQ in 2014, titled ‘The Shadow Trapper’s Almanac’ marked his first solo exhibition in Mumbai. The upcoming show, ‘Portraits in Time’, will be his second solo show with TARQ.
Obscure Objects
Over the years, Samanta has been a part of group shows across India and abroad. Besides finding a presence in numerous art fairs such as Art Dubai, Dhaka Art Summit, Art Chennai and the India Art Fair, his works are a part of several prestigious public art projects such as the installation at the Hyatt
Regency, Delhi (2016), a site specific collaborative project at IIM Amedabad (2016), T-2 Liminus, Mumbai International Airport (2013) and Bee-Hive at the Hyatt Regency, Chennai (2011) – both curated by Rajiv Sethi. In 2002, Samanta artistic practice was recognized and celebrated with an award from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, New York, USA. He lives and works in New Delhi.
Portraits in Time
Tanmoy Samanta | About the author
ABOUT THE AUTHOR Veeranganakumari Solanki Jamwal is an independent curator and artwriter; based in Bengaluru, India. She studied English Literature; and holds post-graduate diplomas in Indian Aesthetics; Art Criticism and Theory; as well as a Masters in History; and was a participant of the first Gwangju Biennale International Curators’ course. Her curatorial experience has involved research, curating and co-curating exhibitions and writing for several art publications and journals on emerging Indian, Asian and international artists and art practices; in India as well as internationally. She is currently the India correspondent for Flash Art International. She was on the jury panel of the 8th and 9th edition of the Arte Laguna Prize and is the recipient of the first illySustainArt Curator’s prize (2011) and the 1st Annual ALICE (Artistic Landmark in Contemporary Experience) Public’s Voice
Award 2012 for best Emerging Curator. She has contributed papers and articles to several international art journals and publications. She has lectured at the Asian Contemporary Art Conference at the Kuandu Biennale, Taiwan and conducted introductory workshops on curating in Kathmandu.
REFERENCES AND NOTES - Jacques Ranciére – ‘The Politics of Aesthetics’ (edited and translated by Gabriel Rockhill; Bloomsbury, 2014) - John Berger – ‘Ways of Seeing’ (British Broadcasting Corporation and Penguin Books)
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