Jaya Ganguly’s tetrospective
Curated by Rakhi Sarkar, Jaya Ganguly’s retrospective traces a four-decade journey away from ornamentation and towards emotional truth—where the personal, the psychological, and the situational unfold with unforced intensity.
Curated by Rakhi Sarkar of Centre of International Modern Art, Artist Jaya Ganguly’s retrospective show at the Visual Arts Gallery and its ongoing exhibition at Art Magnum Gallery, New Delhi, is a refreshing study of creativity and creation. The series of works range from her college life creations of the 80’s and earlier, to that of the late nineties. Primarily situated in the metro city of Kolkata, the works are not city centric by any chance. More befittingly, it can be classified as the painter’s personal journey through her artistic evolution. But what distinguishes the works is not their periodicity in terms of the artist’s growth evolution, but pertinently, the works are a delightful departure from the echelons of ‘preetified’ art and has taken years to evolve.
Unlike artists whose works mature along a developing axis of continuity, this artist’s works depict a tenuous search to depict a continuous focus from the outer self towards ’the proscriptions of a bonded existence’. Thus her canvases are statements on the bipolar character of human life, , where a hanging rope signifies the inevitability of death and the globular outpourings from the elongated neck, or the cigarette hanging from the skull, are the reactions of her alter ego psyche to her surroundings and observations. Most importantly, these works are not statements on society or any other standpoint. Most critics agree on the premise that her works have drifted towards a depiction of her interior commentaries on what she views and thereafter reacts to, in her surroundings. This tendency to be true to the life around her clearly emerges in the series of ‘dark’ images, where she powerfully worked on a man-woman equation in terms of her depiction of realism.
What sets the artist apart is not the frank statemen-like approach to human relationships but as one critic has observed, her gradually hinging closer to the aesthetic foundations of sage Abhinavgupta, who propounded that Rasa comes upfront when situational factors around it, are presented in an appropriate form. The art of Jaya Ganguly thereby develops her situational potential through emotional possibilities, and exploits it by ‘dramatizing’ its details in pertinently personal art phraseology.
This is not to say that once she had found her art vocabulary, she turned complacent On the contrary, this factor led her to greater awakenings as she has made her works an inner-outer commentary, particularly when she has delved into the ‘horror and hopelessness’ of the Covid years. According to Rituparna Basu, the ‘sense of self-preservation and concern for the well-being of society overrode the trauma, so that the depiction of faces came to be enriched in masks, hiding the pain and loneliness’
But it would be an incomplete analysis to look at the works from an inner-outer prism alone. There is also the phenomena of a continuum in the works for though the works have an inner phraseology behind, there is also a likeness to Tagore art of the ‘dark period;’. This throwback is also a depiction of the grime and the sublime, in the most presentable manner. Perhaps one of the first experts to have spotted her genius, according to the artist herself, was none other than the late B C Sanyal who on first seeing her works had expressed a desire to come face to face with the ‘sundari’ who had created this conglomerate of the deep and the daring, in her art. The retrospective show therefore, has proven to be an ideal platform to see the landmark specimens of Jaya Ganguly’s four decade long journey on the one hand, as also the capacity to give voice to inner urges, in ways that are forthright and telling, without any attempt to rely on tantalising beautification.
