At Dinner Time

"Our surrounding incidents, the news and city culture reaches out to me, but I receive them in my own way though imaginary thoughts. In my works these known sights and situations are transformed into unknown worlds. Reality is visually changed. We are so much absorbed in our busy life and perhaps almost self-centered, so that among the crowd, too, we are separated. A collection of readymade images, ranging from random posters to lifestyle magazines to a variety of advertisement serials, news items and such shape our sense of reality. All of these elements find their source in the mass media. In the album works, I have worked on establishing a contrast between this very same sense of reality and the downright horrific. The figures and faces were over-painted whimsically to strike us with shock as well as amusement at its unnatural quality. On some point it is a targeted mockery of ritualistic customs, which are somewhat as absurd to the contemporary generation as is portrayed using the chosen medium. Bizarre elements fuse with subtle reality and are framed as are all souvenir photographs. My paintings explore the contexts that maintain a fine balance between the simplicity of child art and the dark and gloomy adult world. The amalgamation as well as a contradiction creates some form of pictorial tension, hence aiming to place itself in the contemporary scene. Serious social contexts are dealt with child-like naivety. Multi-storied dwelling spaces, breezy night walks, and images with a dreamy lucidity are painted using a heavy impasto of opaque pigments. In my paintings, commonly occurring closed spaces and urban-scapes are borrowed and then transformed into otherworldly scenes, often bringing into the picture the humour out of something that cannot possibly exist. However crowded the elements in the composition may be, a prevailing essence of solitude is to be observed throughout. These figures which are reduced to its simplicity, be they peacefully swimming about, struggling for survival, engaged in contextual activities or scattered naturally across the confined pictorial space, appear to be within a crowd yet in their own way isolated. I like to add in most works a kind of two- perspective view to make the spectator understand the dream-like imagery of the scenes. Pasted collage has helped in giving scope to unlimited variety. I have mainly used thick and gritty brushstrokes for the purpose of adding more physicality to the works."

Diplekha Dey