Dibyangshu Dasgupta
The artist was born in 1961 in Kolkata and obtained a diploma in
Visual arts from the Indian Art College, Rabindra Bharati University. The
uniqueness of Dibyangshu's work is defined by his philosophy. In his words,
"With the ultimate vision of a child I smile at your serious world that thrives
on nothingness . to discover some day that truth was the very 'fun' you always
ignored". Dibyangshu's art is 'child art' in the profoundest sense. His
apparently simple images mirror a child's heightened perception of the world,
instinctive awareness of the small but telling detail, and a transmutation of
the visible world into an experiential fantasy of line, form, and color.
Dibyangshu's imagination plays with everything he sees. His inspiration may
come from one of his students at work or play, a workaday object, everyday
scenes of nature and animals, a soaring kite, a festival, or even a fragment of
folk song. So, the king and queen on a chessboard come quaintly alive; an
anchor transforms into a scuba diver; birds preen or communicate gravely, or in
blurs of animated movement; a storm becomes a 'wild whisper' of flyaway kites
and trees; a huge crescent moon crashes in a passage of light, into the broken
roof of a hut; 'Mother Durga' at her festival becomes a fiercely inspirational
amalgam of mobile line and color; and gravity often dissolves into playfulness
as in 'Sagi and the Moon'. The images captured are both Indian and eternal.
The artist's style is elemental. Detail is selectively reduced to
its fundamental significance in the total composition, to convey the 'genius'
and emotion of the moment. In their simplicity the compositions sometimes verge
on suggestive abstraction, as in 'The Sea Saw'. Motion and form are indicated
with exact placements of appropriate lines. Form and line blur sometimes into a
fantasy of color as in 'The Wedding Car' or 'Mother Durga'. Perspective too
assumes a revealing dimension - a child's point of view - in the 'Kite Flyer'.
And the artist uses a finely textured paper for his compositions, which confers
on his images the haze of fantasy as of pictures seen through water.
Dibyangshu claims that he has learnt more from his child students
than they have learnt from him. 'The child is father of the man' says
Wordsworth, and in Dibyangshu's art the 'child view' becomes a 'world view',
acutely sensitive, profoundly significant - a departure from a tired reality
towards a new possibility.
