The squares within a square, little enclosures staring back like vapid windows– within which are contained things undecipherable, unyielding; geometric arrangement of surfaces; lines mildly twisting into partially-navigated turns, semi-intentional marks refrained from running amok are the recurring symptoms of Mobasshier Mojumdar’s paintings which apparently beg the nomenclature of abstraction.
If abstraction offers a way to reduce into and channel the perceived sensory stimuli through a purity of expression, a singular act of cognitive dissociation from the seen which direct the mind to the felt, then this is what Mobasshier’s action paintings might be summed up as. A non-academic autodidact, he exhibits a flair for compositional irreverence with an almost childlike abandon. Yet, the element of playfulness remains amiss due to a predilection for a sombre colour palette which surprises one by a sheer excess of lack, by its poignant frugality. Which rather points to an anxious mind at play, gingerly unfolding only to fold back in too soon, or so is illustrated by the movement of the curves and swirls which seem prone to screeching to a halt before it could reach its potentially dramatic end– dissolving into a stasis, a resounding inertia. Though the artworks resonate with vivacious physical performance—yet the sweeping strokes; the drippings careening out of a brush; the lines and sharply etched contours of alphabets, et al, appear to embody emotions that is hardly let out of hands. It also feels as if the artist is engaged in making marks that float unanchored on the surface in abeyance of a certain depth of field– out of sync, proportion or balance and defying all rules of cohesion. And it is this very unexpected correlation wrought between random disorder and conceptual vacuity and the fact that it is rendered with a simplicity which at the same time touches lightly on a truant anarchy (?) which incites enough curiosity but stops just short of stirring up agitation of the mind/thought.
Question is, is it what a stranger to the academia is wont to dish up?
A level playing field that accommodates multitudinous ways of seeing and expressing, allows one as well to relate idiosyntrically to one’s world in a spirit of equal opportunity while also surreptitiously offering an invitation to burrow one’s experientiality within a zone of comfort ( signalling a solipsistic attitude). Yet this very field is a treacherous ground imbued with an urgency to make moral choices which weigh heavily on every one of us in a world transitioning way too fast and thus necessitating routine recalibration of values, means and ends and manners of living– caught as we are within a frenzied interface between man and man-made machines that informs every aspect of life, be it patterns of knowledge production, social/cross-cultural interactions, ecological choices and most importantly creative expressions. Wavering at the crossroads of a plethora of pulls in multiple directions, in a hyper-incongruous world of connectivity and/or its ominous consequences and still to confine oneself inside a generic capsule is like playing a vertiginous game of truth or dare. If truth be chosen, arguably, one might easily be prompted into throwing up a lot of uneasy ‘whys’; and as for a response to dare, on the other hand, it is seen pretty much writ large across the paintings– the artist has, arguably, travelled the conduits of an expressivity as banal as the title suggests. “Atpoure Bashona”( banal desire)– a desire that perpetually foretells a stodgy presence of an interior that tumble within its contours, or in visually referential terms, within the whimsies of the ‘windows’ (seen on the pictorial planes time and again) or in other words, perhaps, the bulk of the nature and extent of what they forestall by way of an infiltration of the exterior.