HYDERABAD: Kalakriti Art Gallery has brought forth a series of 54 works by artist Avijit Dutta that have been clubbed together as a solo show titled, ‘Life is a deck of cards’. The Kolkata-based artist, unveils a visual journey for the viewers where he reinstates the nuances and episodes from life as similar to the game of cards where uncertainty prevails and within seconds the hierarchy shifts from one player to another.The series of sensitively rendered works with water colours on canvas unveil snippets from the artist’s life in the form of visual poetry. The artist never gets illustrative or overtly realistic in his diction or rendering.
He delicately weaves a moment from his memory and family albums and visual impressions from childhood as hazy metaphors that make their presence felt and immediately amalgamate into the space that imbibes rich, textured, references that initiate an allegorical experience. There is an undercurrent of innocence and fantasy in the works that enlivens the space tremendously.
The works exemplify multiple phases and anecdotes from the artist’s life. Rendered with utmost gentleness and finesse, these exemplify the artist’s experience of reliving moments, embracing them and celebrating them as a part of a bigger process, as a fragment of the continuously evolving/changing/mutating existence. The realistically re-established sections from old photographs are surrounded by dreamlike, ambiguous space, which accentuates the conceptual depth of the works and keeps them from being mere representations from the past. The unrealistic, unbounded and abstract extent of the background, grants the works an unsurpassable spirit and strength. “This exhibition intends to describe the various phases of human life. Each of the cards are symbolic quotient following the ups and downs of such life. All the 54 cards depict our common stories. Each of them are demarcated phases of life from childhood with its innocence followed by the values, with which we proclaim ourselves to be grown up,” says the artist talking about his opuses.