Gallery Ensign presents solo show by Samir Aich titled “Nerve Line of Being” September 20, 2010

Gallery Ensign presents a solo show titled “Nerve Line Of Being” that includes canvases and paper works by Samir Aich, at Gallery Ensign, B-17, Geetanjali Enclave, New Delhi – 110017, from September 21 till October 30, 2010. The artist will also present a slide show on the evening of the show opening on September 21, 2010.
Says Samir Aich: “When I started painting after completing my education, I used to draw my emotions, my experiences of society and my personal statement through surrealism. I have always tried to fathom what we don’t see apparently – and hence abstraction started getting entry into my work. After doing abstract works for some time, the question that became most important - what is really abstraction? In our country the term – figurative, non- figurative is very popular and most of the artists, art critics and art lovers think that non figurative or non identified form is abstraction. But I found that there is no non-figurative art in this world. I believe that everything whether known or unknown is figurative. They might be three dimensional or two dimensional. In my personal opinion, abstraction is a feeling of mind or visual that we see. So, I try to work on abstraction thinking through known forms and sometimes unknown too. In the current series of my canvases, you can see and feel the same.”
Says Seema Subanna, Director, Gallery Ensign: “When I first saw Samir’s work, the simplicity of his expression touched me. The use of colour and specially the textures is very interesting. He uses very simple objects to express himself – like the cups, kettle, hangers etc. but for him the objects are not important, but they are just a means through which he expresses himself. There are a lot of memories. He conveys his deep rooted feelings through these objects - the memories of childhood, fun, mischief, growing up years, the turmoil that he went through in life etc.”
Samir Aich has, to all evidence, a knack for new mutations. Not that, unlike us, he is not a creature of a highly verbalized planet, nor that he also is not bound down tightly in a straight-jacket of nuts and bolts, as it were. This 21st ‘new’ century earth has, more and more of an assembly line logic; all becoming mass produced. But then artists are creatures of impulse, children of joy and thus they try their mightiest to break out into the open, and when they cannot do this, they grimace and make such images as a growl. Aich too uses all the indigestible objects that surround him -- from coat hangers cups and kettles and all the other disposables- to revoke childhood memories that were once free of angst.
Samir’s spiritual development proceeds from this same sensibility. Art for him is a continuous process of exploration, that of the raw, unworked material of common life -- in special of the locale in which he was born. Emotions certainly seem to tell on him, and strongly. But post that he does his mightiest to wash them in running water, quite as they do gold mixed with no end of rubbish. For him, ideas are something to impress on a concrete material of sensations, as to mould and manipulate them sensuously. There are, but of course, certain constants, of colours or symbols that have remained intact or almost so with him from the beginning. But these have only led to fresh, new variations. It is so he quite naturally and without undue deliberation goes to the extremes of abstraction but which is still tinged with a certain amount of realism. Such contemporaneous contrasts represent, not a contradiction, but the same, in- born sensibility, reacting with different visual resonances to the given material.
The so called abstractions, in single mono colour surfaces, are gifted with the barest of signs, geometric lines, or imprints. The net result of all such sparseness, of all such reserve, makes for the badly needed wide open spaces and of a liberated imagination. The work kills noise, kill the din of a crowded planet, it heals. The work is feather weight, so that it allows the viewer to fly.
This show also includes paper drawings, and the ‘emphasis’ in them is an under-emphasis, no gavel hitting a judge’s desk over here! It is meant to open the mind’s eye. An eye too dulled in our big cities.
All who wish to develop an understanding of the underlying elements of form and rhythm that govern good art ought to observe this order of craft. It is free of the violent distortions of forms, in particular, of the human figure. One can contemplate it without the intrusion of any disturbing thoughts. Contemplation is what in fact the works demand from the viewer. One just cannot hurry over them. They are serene and poised.
Yet even as we linger over the lot, we feel that they are also intensely alive with tension produced by the balance of internal stresses and gestures of token forms. To repeat, the work seems to lift one out of the scramble and scutter of the day’s diurnal round right into a benevolent world where there is no clash or conflict and the inevitable opposing forces are harmoniously reconciled.
In sum, Samir’s present compositions are symptomatic of the tendency among artists to discard the actual evidence of the forces of nature., in an attempt to symbolize, in new ways, the impulses themselves.