In waiting…
Debnath Basu

‘Darkness in effect, is the ground for light, which seems an old and also sturdy principle…. What if light were black – is there black light?’ Robert Creely

The absurdity and inevitability, the visibility and the indistinctness, the readability and the illegibility, the personal and the political, the grim and the mirth, the darkness and the revelations – these are some of the paired ideas crossed my mind when I was glancing through the works of Debnath Basu. I knew, even from that initial cursory look, that I would have to come back to his works again, probably multiple times, to make sense of his carefully crafted layered ideas, both visual and conceptual, in the light of the above thoughts and beyond them. His works are quietly and firmly demanding, to say the least. They require a patient engaged viewing (reading as well), allowing the works to unfold themselves, layer by layer, leading to a rewarding experience at the end instigating us to think and look out of the box. There is a lot about his works that take us outside the framed images, into the complex, uneven, and hyper world, mediated through cross-references, inter-textualities, and unforgivable memories. Vulnerable moments of personal angst too are noticeable in his work, albeit under the garb of metaphorically imagined, interpreted and positioned motifs and subjects.

Debnath’s works often throw a challenge to the very retinal act of viewing a work of art. Most of his works monochromatic works (not black and white), submerged in dark and dense grey tonalities making the visibility intriguingly problematic. The large scale works or smaller drawings – both expect an intense viewing like reading a palimpsest in the dark corners of a mediaeval cathedral. More so because Debnath’s works, like medieval palimpsests, often grow from the pre-existing texts or images by partially obscuring them, erasing them, or reworking on them, thus deliberately expunging the surface-glamor or pleasant viewing. Viewers are compelled to encounter the murky blackened patches swarmed with countless figures drawn in a rather unobtrusive way or the dark surfaces with barely discernible texts inscribed, ages ago, as it were. Even in the works which are less dark, the viewer can still be baffled, amidst textually treated surfaces, by the gradually emerging human figures like a mass of anonymous nondescript figures which seemingly looked like incoherent trifling marks and arbitrary non-conformist lines. Eventually, lines and by the same token drawings assume a life of their own despite coexisting with the texts. Indisputably, texts play a major role in Debnath’s works. Texts help him to strike a hushed dialogue between the text-ure and the images by allowing them to feed each other. Evidently the emphasis is on the idiosyncratic disarming visual expressions suggesting ridiculousness and precariousness of human existence. Debnath, in this context, plays a double role. He seems to be proposing his art to be viewed both as a witness and a critique of this human condition. His art draws our attention to the ruthless, irreverent life that proliferates in the underbelly of a civilized society and challenges the power-game at every possible intervention.

Darkness typically stands for inadequacy of light. Darkness in Debnath’s works, on the contrary, is more affirmative. It signifies blackness loaded with effective implications. Blackness for Debnath, is a kind of light that illuminates and holds his motifs. It offers refuge to a plethora of damned figures, forbidden gesticulations and sardonic acts. Ostensibly, those who are bound to live in the back streets of our reality develop a phobia about open illuminated spaces. What has been banished, along with the white light, are distance and solitude – both dreaded by the subculture. Debnath shares those fears. He finds himself eloquent in this dark location – a designated space – where he exercises his freedom teemed with social wits and private satires with occasional touches of macabre comedy. Debnath reinforces the faith that dark humour in art invites us to question, laugh, and reflect on the complexities of the human experience. Debnath’s works, with an additional sense of predicament, seek a subversive visual strategy invoking irreverence, vitriol, and satire. His visual idiom is quirky and eccentric yet subtle and meticulous like a traditional engraver, reminiscent of his training as an accomplished printmaker. On the other hand, he creates a quasi-narrative visual diatribe, sneering at the limits of language as well as human idiocies.

Debnath Basu’s context of his art is locational as much as it is socio-cultural/political and referential. The socio-political resides in the content of his works while the locational can be found in the visual strategies he adopts. Howrah, one of the most congested urban neighborhoods, is a strange city which is incorrigibly chaotic revealing its bizarre urban spaces in their most perilous existence embedded in their underbellies in a ceaseless narrative, albeit without a beginning or end and without any pre-scripted plot. One of the oldest unplanned industrial towns with a high population density and shrinking living spaces unfolds its impromptu random drama that defies order, challenges lockdown, and celebrates irreverence. For him, location is not merely the subject-matter but a conceptual metaphor to imagine the most appropriate visual language to explore. While the location provides Debnath the foundation for his visual idiom, his wide exposure and responses to various literature comprising a range from critically acclaimed writings to subcultural popular materials, provides him the references to work on. Be it Jibananda Das or Nabarun Bhattacharya or Akhteruzzaman Elias or Tarapada Roy or circulated pamphlets like the one printed and distributed by K. C. Paul debunking the conventional Heliocentrism theory and proposing that the sun revolves around the earth or legal documents pertaining to his own courtroom battle – all of them in some way or the other embody the stories of the ridiculous impact of the power game and its predicament. To augment this conceptual transmutation from a physical location to a visual language and technique, Debnath applies a highly innovative medium, result of years of experimentations. He uses Industrial Graphite Powder as the main visualizing pigment. He darkens the surface and thereafter reveals the lines emerging from that pool of dark, smudgy, text ridden surfaces. Amidst the apparent confusion a close reading reveals human beings in various engagements – from violent to erotic to ludicrous. The intrinsic carnivalesque tenor of this visualization unmasks our comfort zone in more than one way.

How does Debnath negotiate the almost Kafkaesque situation that haunts his works and himself? Debnath moves a step ahead in re-textualizing and revisualizing the context simply by taking nothing for granted, allowing things to bevulnerable and exposed. The technical procedure itself is replete with associative meanings and implications. Even the graphite dust he uses is procured from the iron foundries of his own locality like most of the imageries themselves. Like the texts and images in his works, gloom and humor too are inseparable in his art. Paradoxically, these works are not about art only. They are about trudging across a pool of history, culture, anecdotes, references, and ironies. Satire has now become a maverick apparition composed of the plight of the dispossessed and the obscene shamelessness of those who wield power. The subversive visual puns are unmistakable in these dark recesses. There is a strong element of distrust and suspicion too which allows sarcasm to slip in, in the pretext of banality. Moreover, Debnath’s art does not contain any overt political comment; his dissent consists of transposing political critiques into popular tragedies, everyday misfortunes, and back street miseries. In other words, these images in Debnath’s art occupy a social space remote from and in opposition to the spectacular culture of advanced capitalism. Vulnerability becomes both the cause and effect of this condition. By being vulnerable and thus free from normative behaviors the images also imply the susceptibility of the power structure itself, by deriding the control invested in the institutions and canonical traditions.

The writing on the wall seems to be – art must reveal and dismantle.