Albert Ashok: A Stranger in the Crowd: 2016

"In this contemporary political scenario, Chaos is my best man. He strikes us with wonder and deception; he is an avenger as well as a magician. Chaos has no definite face, body or structure. It is ambivalent and elusive to the senses. His subjects are perversely grotesque and unpredictably mild.

This series of paintings portray the many dimensions of chaos, its subliminal, historic and metaphoric influences in our lives. Hope you all enjoy these paintings as much as I did while working on them over a significant phase of my life."
- Albert Ashok

Chaos in Wonderland

Solo exhibition card

AduurI ( sweet heart) 18 x 24 inches acrylic on canvas

The Floating clouds 30 x 36 inches Acrylic on canvas
"You will not see the sweet blue sky always. How we see different kinds of clouds in the sky; black and white, heavy and light, opaque and luminous, some are murderous and assaulting as well. This thought moved me to paint a woman lost in appreciating the uncertainty."

Blood River, Acrylic on canvas 5 x 3 feet

Blood River! Time is changed. and has been changing. War torn cities gushing and flowing blood like rivers. The menace of terrorism and religion based politics from middle-east Asia appears in the global platform. The aggressive nature of authoritarian country with leftist last straw hits all the civilians in most countries. The Boko haram, ISIS, Taliban as terror outfit with their guerrilla style - butchering innocent people. Human rights are divided on murderers, some advocate impunity some want punishment. We human beings are killed politically religiously and economically like cattle, and are frightened. Like rust in the iron scrap, our existence are waiting for to be dumped. Where is Humanity? What is future of this planet?

Bull Head 18 x 24 inches acrylic on canvas

Fowl Play, Acrylic on canvas 5 x 3 feet

Life means achieving something. Wherever you go whatever you do you always wanted to some achievements. But do we really achieve something? In my wonderland, I find in reality we are happy after geting some fowl. In most cases, common people – are reluctant to catch a big fish, It never matters to them whether they are naked, or they have any shelter. They never incensed by the life that plays foul with them and cheating them from achieving big something.

Fruit bearing tree, 24 x 30 inches acrylic on canvas

Liberation, Acrylic on canvas 5 x 3 feet

Liberation! Sexual aggression on female is the basic instinct what male acquired from evolution.it resides in every male being and this aggression is an immense force for male to win the hostile circumstances and from other species, If you remove this property from male being the human race will be at stake.No physical strength will be found in men and human race clock will be stopped. But this sexual aggression is a utmost fear for woman. Woman want a world where she has no fear from man. This is her liberation. Through the human history, we saw women are protected by the same man force she fears, from animal attacks, natural calamities,catastrophe and warfare. Still, woman want liberation, and liberation is her born rights.

Midnight talk II, Acrylic on canvas 5 x 3 feet

Midnight Moon, 24 x 30 inches acrylic on canvas

Otherside of the fence 30x 36 inches Acrylic on canvas

Pink Horizon 5 x 4 feet acrylic on canvas

Sound from a Lifeless Guitar 30 x 36 inches Acrylic on canvas

Sound from a Lifeless Guitar! A guitar is made of wooden body and steel string. It’s a lifeless thing, it cant generate sound unless a living soul touches it. Human life is also like a non-living guitar. It cant strum the right note. A few men women are worth the earthly living. And the rest appear and disappear with time. No footmarks or sound you will hear from them.

The wonder and excitement of Nature 30 x 36 Acrylic on canvas

Troubled life 18x 24 inches acrylic on canvas

Salvation: (two musician) 60 x 48 inches acrylic on canvas

When life fails to deliver you from suffering, Music does.

Not available

Happy Moments -III

The Terrible and the lyrical

The Paintings of Albert Ashok and Samarendra Kumar Datta
Diversity of form in contemporary painting is extensive, as it contains all the legacies of the past not only of our country but also of the various trends through out the world. An artist builds up his own form through selection and synthesis of various inheritances according to his/her own motivation and world out look. Our modernity started with assimilation of western naturalism during the middle of nineteenth century. The second trend of the modernity grew out of the rebellion against such foreign invasion that prompted the artists towards the search for an indigenous identity out of a nationalist ideology delving deeper into the legacy of our classical and popular past. The forms of neo-Indian school thus generated. All the subsequent developments till modernist and Post- modern have grown out of these two basic structures.

The present duet show of the two artists Albert Ashok and Samarendra Kumar Datta is based on two basic trends of the initial phase of our modernity, that is western naturalism and indigenous heritage. The trends are naturally diverse. But the variation endows the show with a different charm revealing how the contemporary life contains the stresses growing out of its complexities and at the same time sublimates the same towards an enchantment and divine beauty.

Albert Ashok is a self made man whose artistic faculty has developed out of his struggling interaction with the life. Born in Agartala of Tripura in 1961 has lost his mother at the age of one and half. The struggle started there. When he was eight or nine, he felt he had an indomitable urge for artistic creativity. But finding no way out he fled from his home at the age of seventeen in search of art. He learnt painting through strife with this life.The life was very much real to him. He might have felt that he could express this dissension through realism, and the reality could best be captured through naturalist form. After conquering a good grasp on naturalism, he deviated. Naturalism has its own limitation. But if it can be energized with subsequent trends of distortions and geometrical innovations, It can delve deeper into reality and also super-reality. At a certain stage Albert converted his realism into fantasy to reveal the deeper mystery of life, of love and sexuality. Out of this fantasy and a mystery a different kind of beauty was revealed to him. He could extract beauty out of struggle of life. He endowed his naturalism with cubist geometrical structure. The synthesis revealed the contradiction between the beauty and the horrid and also how the terrible can be resurrcted towards the pleasant. The present series of paintings shown in this exhibition is built out of this philosophy. Where pastoral cows contain the metropolitan violence and complexities, and the ‘bathing woman’ reveal within her lyrical and bucolic charm an intricate strife with this life. He has made a successful admixture of urban and rural ethos.

Mrinal Ghosh
29.05.2015

Wonderland-Fantasy

Recent Paintings of Albert Ashok

The title of the exhibition of the present series of paintings by Albert Ashok, which happens to be his 7^th solo is ‘Human, Humanoid and Poetry in Wonderland’. He has some preference for the world of grotesque and fantasy, which he calls ‘Wonderland’. He titled his last exposition as ‘Chaos in Wonderland’. This wonderland is not far off from his existence, from the environment he lives in, that is from the contemporary times. But in the process of fantasizing, the known world and the present time gets transformed. Elements of past and future, elements of myth and imaginary world creep in. But the aim of the artist is to unmask the various layers of reality that darkens the present state of existence. Albert is basically a romantic rebellion. The absurdity of contemporary existence haunts him. He tries to find a way out, some times in the form of anguish, often in the form of apparent sobriety and lyrical transcendence. In this exhibition there are works of both these trends,

Fantasy is an essential mode of expression in visual arts. Literally or lexically the word means an imagined state of situation usually pleasant and often to some extent caustic or sarcastic. In Greek aesthetics the entire field of expression used to be classified in two streams: mimesis and fantasia. Mimesis reflected the natural. When the image deviated from the natural, it used to be categorized as fantasia. In Indian classical aesthetics the term ‘chamatkara’ was devised by the aesthetician Visvanatha to indicate the essence of fantasy. Abhinabagupta, another aesthetician assimilated ‘chamatkara’ with ‘rasa’ to give the term greater validity. However in Indian classicism ‘chamatkara’ was elevated to the state of the transcendental. But the situation of primitivist and modernist art is different. In both these trends fantasy is a general and very significant trend of expression that tends to enter deeper both to mystify and demystify the reality, to dissect it. Fantasy is often used as a form of rebellion, as has been done in expressionism, cubism and surrealism.

The forms of Albert Ashok are based on naturalism. He transforms the voluminous illusionist three dimensional rendering into a state of comic ridiculous situation to mimic the pseudo-valor and expanded egoistic ambition of human being, often to find a pleasant situation to indicate peace and tranquility. The way he transforms the natural is akin to the ridiculous situation of fantasy. When he tries for tranquility his expressions reflect some elements of ‘chamatkara’.

Albert Ashok is a self made man and self taught artist. From a blank situation he has struggled hard to come to his present position of an established artist. The struggle has given him an insight to look into and realize the human situation and the state of affairs through which the contemporary civilization is soaring high with a deep void within it. To him the entire situation is ridiculous, a sort of wonderland and pulsating with a possibility of annihilation. His fantasy grows out of this void.

In the present exhibition we see his large format canvases painted in acrylic showing various forms of fantasy, vibrant and tranquil. In the painting titled ‘Humanoid’ he paints a couple on horse back. Out of the dynamism he extracts a sense of void. In ‘Happy Moments’ a couple sits on a sofa, the man with a guitar in hand, the woman with a book. In some of the other works like ‘Sohag’, where a woman takes a bath in a pond, ‘The Blue Musician’ playing guitar, ‘Yellow Bird and a Cowherd’, a pleasant pastoral scene, the artist creates different faces of ‘Wonderland’. The myth is far from existing reality. ‘Wonderland’ is a tragic void.

MRINAL GHOSH

(Ananada Bazar Patrika)

4 Feb 2016