History, they say, has a way of repeating itself. Though this repetition is rarely a mirror image, it has enough intrinsic elements for a clear ‘recycling' to be apparent. In cultural theory, the postmodern aesthetic accepts ‘a borrowing from other texts and styles across Genres in such a way that distinctions between high and low culture, western and other cultures, or the past and present are broken down. The result is a self-ironic eclecticism and knowingness, experienced by media-wise audiences and readers along with the postmodern artist, all well-versed in the key postmodernist devices of pastiche, parody, recycling and sampling.'
Since his student days in the late 1990s, Debraj Goswami has been engaged with the recycling of existing images from art historical references and adapting them with dramatic/surreal/ironic-comic effect. It was at a group exhibition held at the Nazar Art Gallery in Baroda of which Debraj was a part, that I saw him use the ‘David' image for the first time, recycling it in an interesting way to meet his own needs. Then Debraj went to the UK on the prestigious Charles Wallace scholarship. On his return from UK , Debraj made Baroda his home and continued to work on his paintings.
Debraj paints slowly and in the isolation of his apartment, working on his images with meticulous care. ‘Recycling' demands a sustained study and understanding of the image to be used for recycling so that it can be appropriated meaningfully at different levels of interpretation. Over a period of time, Debraj's visual language has also undergone distinct changes–earlier it was a more direct, obvious presentation with descriptive titles as clues. The language is now subtler, allowing the viewer a larger scope for interpretation. At one level, Debraj's imagery appears overtly surreal – a harmless banana or lady's finger transforms into a blade of a vicious dagger, a microscope sits on a fluffy pillow, inconspicuous objects of daily use such as a toothpaste, a key, a fork, a cloth peg become missiles hurtling towards a naked man. “But I am a realist at heart,” emphasizes the artist passionately. “Under the apparent meaninglessness of Surrealist imagery, there are hidden connections that need to be deciphered. This is the complication of our times. As long as we fail to understand the connections, we find the images ‘useless' but as soon as understanding dawns, the painting is as clear as daylight, open to several interpretations!”
It has taken Debraj a long time to understand and finally arrive at the visual language that he can call his own. The process was difficult, led to troubling questions such as, why am I painting, what must I paint and the struggle to find satisfactory answers. There was also the business of coming to terms with the fact that he had left printmaking behind. Over the last few years when Mediatic Realism had taken hold of Baroda 's younger artists' imagination and a lot of good to indifferent work proliferated, Debraj had the good sense not to jump onto the bandwagon. As an accomplished printmaker, Debraj had the technical skill to transfer any dramatic image from any media onto canvas, over-paint on it and set himself up in business. “But I knew that it would not be my language,” he admits. “I did not want to take short-cuts and was quite content to make five good paintings rather than 50.”
As already mentioned earlier, the idea of recycling works of the Old Masters and re-interpreting them in contemporary terms has been fascinating Debraj for quite a while. “We live in a recycled world,” he smiles, “so I decided to have some fun with the idea.” Some of the Masterpieces recycled frequently in Debraj's recent paintings are Picasso's Guernica, Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel painting of God and Adam, Rodin's Thinking Man. Debraj is continuously looking for that space of contemporary relevance within the older work that he can highlight and work on, discovering unusual meanings and visual possibilities in the process. In the Michelangelo painting, it is the gap between the index fingers of God and Adam that becomes the focus of Debraj's interest. Recycled in its new avatar , the gap increases significantly to accommodate images of personal conflict (for example, the solarized double portrait of the artist, with cut pointing fingers dancing all around the portraits, with one of the fingers a knife blade) as well as accusatory ‘finger-pointing' in the arena of public affairs that demand rights without fulfilling duties. The pointing finger, in fact, becomes a recurring leitmotif in Debraj's paintings, curling this way and that, angry, accusing, blaming, demanding explanations.
Sometimes, the recycled image becomes the central vantage point from which the painting radiates to its left and right. For instance, in a triptych, Rodin's Thinking Man sits atop the base of the Egyptian Sphinx in the central panel. The Sphinx has its claws fully bared, a covert reference to the often evil machinations of a thinking, super-intelligent human mind gone astray, while the panels flanking it portray a dagger with God's finger (from the Michelangelo work) for a blade, a paradoxical reference to its life-giving/killing qualities while the left panel has the ironical image of the hind quarters of a dog with furry texture of a tiger – apni gali mein kutta bhi sher ban jata hai ! At other times, the recycled image may be completely dwarfed – as in the striking work of the huge pin-pierced bhindi (lady's finger) transformed into a curling dagger blade centrespread across the rectangular canvas, with the stamp-sized image of Jack Nicholson's smiling but villainous Joker from the Batman film at the top-centre.
Debraj Goswami's paintings on canvas and paper explore a wide scope of human behaviour, with all its existing frailties and strengths, portraying it via a dramatically arresting visual language that puts to work the skills of a master printmaker, a referential ‘dictionary' of art history, and a stubborn diligence of a conscientious artist.
