Goutam Ghosh
“Impermanency is where I find permanency”, Goutam says, in his usual ‘informal’ line of attack. “I don’t think it as a perverse cause as far as I am concerned. That is how one grows when one keeps himself itinerant”. Exploring and experimenting, these two conditions are not only significant but essential to Goutam’s art practices. Analyzing Goutam’s work meticulously, which portrays a rather heuristic than dogmatic approach, it is essential for the viewer also to train their senses to be inclusive in a way that they comprehend the pun effortlessly. It is not the ‘fine formal’ but it is the very element of a ‘questioned form’ which carries his works. For him the practice of exploring the potentials of objects around him is not merely the identification of either beauty or quality, but it takes place as liberation; let the object be, in whatsoever shape and form. Thus he signifies the existences of scores of objects within a subjective discourse irrespective of various academically connoted terms like ‘composition’ or ‘harmony’. For him any subject matter is not a singular entity where you have a set of forms to articulate. In his work, very significantly, the ‘subject’ is a collective derivation from various co-existing realities. In the wide range of representational traits, Goutam’s works provide much more linguistic nuances, in a sense that it allows the viewer to revisit their own identification of the objects and the political connotations they carry with the help of ‘restructured and redefined forms’.
The appropriation of the ‘real world’ in Goutam’s creations occurs in multiple layers. This multiplicity provides plural entrances and areas of interpretation to his works. It increases accessibility, but it also sets up ambiguous metaphorical situations, reading and operating at evocative cross-purposes with each other. Many times he is not able to confine his choices of objects. In fact he never restricts any objects to enter into the space of his paintings. “In an engrossed span of time when I do my work with all pleasure and pain I never could mange to restrict myself to particular images”. Inappropriate and insufficient to many others’s points of view, any object for him appears as much political because it carries an existence which contributes to the very existence of others too. He further questions the process of inclusion and exclusion in any given action of cultural production. The question of ‘who fits the criteria or what produces the norms’ is evenly addressed throughout his process of development.
Taking cue from various artistic discourses in history, Goutam has no fixation or rigidity in this matter. Such an endeavour in fact allows for a further enablement of his exploration of various possibilities within pictorial representations. The fine mixing of various pictorial idioms including wood cut on to the canvas exemplifies his longing for consistent trialing.
By Abhiram Poduval
