Evocative Acrylics on Paper

Wednesday, October 21, 1992

Animesh Roy’s acrylics on oil sheets and canvas on view at MEC art gallery, evince interest for the young artist’s vertical horizontal and diagonal approaches to composition. He is able to capture the essential inclinations of the character and terrain of landscape, to highlight its structural rhythms in an integrated combine of woods and rocks, harmoniously blending with scattered flourishes of flowers as though arranged by nature’s own impeccable moves. The work is marked by a sense of exploration as much as by revelation, which is indicated by suddenness of the find.

Animesh has a very sensitive soul and an eye for the soulful in nature, even if it is only pretty. The roadside finds are small little treasure troves that suddenly captivate the eye as you turn the bend in a hill road, opening out new and everchanging amplitudes of valleys, the down-going dimensions of declivities. Since, in all his compositions, he has remained near the road, there have been no stirrings of the mysterious, the sombre and the elevating. What he captures is the scale of the inner amplitudes and nature’s own method of setting off one colour against the other.

Quite often there is an effort to create texture, particularly where the brush leaves its own mark on the paper. The tempering of colours, greens, yellows and oranges with blues competently generate a specific mood. Collective rhythms capture his heart as much as dignified individual gestures: the joy of a flower enjoying its lone splendour, its true being in the wider spaces to which it relates without difficulty. In works such as these, one notices the first intimations of metaphoric content of poetical quality. His works hold promise.

K. L. Kaul
The Statesman New Delhi