SUMIT ROY-ABSENCE AND PRESENCE

A look at the works of Sumit Roy suggests that he creates casts and constructs assemblages with mere paint and paper/canvas. Images coalesce into  thin/thick, nearly opaque or  translucent signatures and you are tempted to think of  Chinese xuan paper  made from crushed elm and mulberry tree bark  said to last a millennium. But this is Indian material-it has a viscosity that is truly resonant and it invites artistic emancipation.

 Sumit’s subject matter revolves around the principles of space, time, and spirit. The latter term is a conundrum for Westerners, who tend to confuse this idea with religion or, in the modernist sense, Kandinsky’s appropriation theosophy. Sumit  works with the empty surface of  the planar surface  as well as with the saturation of  colour. Somehow both aspects of his artistic approach reach the same conclusion, which is related to the emptiness of  man, a kind of hovering in time, an anamoly of  absence and presence replete with meaning that dissolves before your  eyes.

The sleight of hand on the surface speaks of a   sprinkling  lightly rather than saturation or pouring  onto the surface. Subjects become abstracted realities woven with a  sense of lightness on the surface- embodying  the “spirit” of the work. Sumit  claims there is always a  history within the idea and the mapping of a  painting. According to him , history has a unique spatiality-and should not be mistaken for time.

He says:” I love human expressions and emotions. That is usually what I like as subjects. I love ornamentation in my works, and love the colors black, red and gold in my works. I tend to bridge realism and abstraction. I hero worship Anish Kapoor, I  also made a portrait of his. It is one of my personal favorite works, as it explains the bridge , and my love for doing portraits, really well.”

The power of the portrait is what he wishes to create. Even as we could see the field of colour and the abstracted contour, he appears to conflate, to turn in upon itself, only to ricochet back into our  visual field.

In  his own signature of the silence of the stroke Sumit is more involved with deeply saturated areas of vertical space, his paintings richly rapped in metaphors of being . Sumit  employs the saturation of  colour tones  with full confidence, and in the process, belies the more studied precision generally associated with elder artists steeped in the study of the human figure Another arresting fact that unveils  is that Sumit is a brilliant theorist and painter, whose works also involve the saturation of color  within the gravity of contour in the human visage, one upon another. The results often appear more solid and lyrically intriguing .

Sumit also weilds his camera to frame images from the world of fashion and the streets of culture.Principles of photography come naturally to this young artist.Metaphors and meandering momentousness moor along his frames.It also  means that  he has appropriated a Western idea of materiality and surface in a manner that appears like Abstract Expressionism.His idea of still life is what became a unique corollary when he visited my home to click it in its sounds of silent solitude.

UMA NAIR

CURATOR AND CRITIC,NEW DELHI