A Retrospective: Works from 1998 to 2007 by Ashok Bhowmick

Hitting The Bull's Eye

For me, what I had said as regards Mr. Ashok Bhowrnick's work early in 2004 still stands: a world in which not workaday reason but imagination or fantasy hold sway. If the artist uses a similitude, he does so simply as a means to stimulate our imaginal sympathies.

Well, here now is a ten year period retrospect, from 1997 onwards. A fair length of time in which to get on approximate feel of any artist's artistic idiosyncracies. Looking over the images from these past years, and reacting to many works positively, what finally, and most fatefully stops me in my tracks is his bull (in the 'bull and bird' series). I mean, here works which were done mainly this year itself, barring a few others from 2006. But some of the same images in incipient forms were there, still earlier. At any rate the genre has come to true fruition right now.

In these almost sculptural images (a few of them of human figures), the painter would seem to shed ballast—not that there was much of that sylistically even earlier. Thus, the puppet like comic heroes etc are gone and consequently the work is far more simplified, bore, and thereby rigorously unified, and that in both on grounds of content as form. The only thing that continues is the long lasting subdued colouration. 'Sisters' is a sampling, stubborn and rigorous in execution, with a rock-like profile, and so quite razor edged. Over here the painter is a sculptor, and to good effects. Such austerity pays handsome dividends. The manner helps concentrate our wavering attention. The whole thing goes done down in our minds like heady drink. 'Dreamers' is another such, with its fully dovetailed, forcefully orchestrated angles and sharp planes.

Having said that, I must revert to the formidable bull, being the same stylistically, but for more engaging, and enigmatic, a primordial symbol of many connotations. Do the flaring nostrils of this bull, and his stern laser-like awesome eyes, as if concentrated on an object of his intense regard, not bring home to us some potent, unnerving truth, but which we would rather disregard? A Gothic shocker, the 'portrait' of this bull is as baffling and compelling as the beast and man tragedy of the world. After all, good and evil are inseparable, beast and man being sewn together with threads of heaven! Thus, the anthropophagus acts of man become the terrible sermons on the Mount of Hate. One cannot hate without hating oneself and therefore making ones own tomb. Maybe I have got the wrong message. But so be it. This work is broad, and wide enough to put your respective meanings in it. But all such meaning will by force of logic be more than skin deep, one perforce bound to be heavyweight.

Just look at those bull eyes, do not they seem to see a red rag? The rage in them is indubitable. May it be that it is a holy rage, glaring at the supine souls of the day, at the could not-care-less neglectful humanity? And the eyes charging us with the crime of indifference vis-a-vis our own heavenly gifts? For us, the price of such neglect, is to be rubbed bock into the mud from which we emerged.

I believe that of the several Bull and Birds in this showing, the one on the catalogue cover is about the most formidable. Several artists on the Indian scene have painted the beast in its many incarnations, but from among them perhaps only Mr. Bhowmick has seized on the metaphor that lies hid in that steely, muscle-bound majesty of what is on the surface only an animal. And in this way his vision wittingly or unwittingly comes to a boil. It helps us transit into another existence, than the diurnal, commonplace one.

- Keshav Malik