"All I have learned and forgotten" a solo show by Tanmoy Samanta at Gallery Espace, 16 Community Centre, New Friends Colony > 10am-6pm on 12th December to 12th January 2013

Time : 10:00 am - 6:00 pm (Sundays Closed)

Entry : Free

Place : Gallery Espace, 16 Community Centre, New Friends Colony, New Delhi - 110025
Venue Info : galleryespace.com | Map | Nearest Metro Station - 'Lajpat Nagar(Violet Line)'

Event Description : Renu Modi, Director, Gallery Espace presents All I have learned and forgotten, a solo show of recent works by Delhi-based artist Tanmoy Samanta.

Tanmoy Samanta (born 1973) completed his bachelors and masters degree in fine arts from Kalabhawan, Santiniketan in 1996. He is the recipient of the Pollock-Krasner Foundation award, New York in 2003.

Known as a painter of the Shantiniketan tradition (whose traces are present in this show through references to both Abanindranath and Rabindranath Tagore), this is his third solo show at Gallery Espace. Samanta’s new body of work expands into 3-D materials and the conceptual territory of magical realism. The objects he uses the most often — maps and clocks, books, keys and locks — tantalize the viewer with evocations of space, time memories and secrets, but the form and function of these objects no longer conforms to the expectations of habit and memory.

Samanta collects old keys that open no locks, locks that are no longer capable of securing anything, watches that keep no time, old books that have spent the knowledge contained in them, in flea markets and street shops in lost alleyways. These objects are transformed into motifs that appear often in his work. While it may be that Tanmoy attempts to evict ritualised meaning from objects, it is through the interplay of simultaneous remembering and forgetting that these images confound and seduce the viewer.

Samanta’s new body of work includes three-dimensional books. He uses old books gluing the pages together, layering it with rice paper, excavating shapes out of the paper, adding objects until the final object is a book only in that the covers are opened to reveal another universe held within them.

In the artist’s words, “This new body of work includes three-dimensional books. I see these books as a form, both as artifact and as medium. It becomes a process of metamorphosis as their old identity and content no longer existed."

Writes Latika Gupta in her essay about the show: “Italo Calvino, writing about the impossible love of Lieutenant Fenimore for Ursula H’x , narrates the tale of the two protagonists falling endlessly through space. The solidity of earth is absent, there is no above or below, nor even any concept of time. The mise-en-scene in the short story is imaged as a perfect void. Looking upon Tanmoy Samanta’s body of work, the viewer experiences a similar sense of dislocation. That which one thought familiar, objects that were recognised at once by their contours, are rendered incomprehensible; the form and function no longer conforming to the expectations of habit and memory. Tanmoy plays with ideas of learning, remembering and forgetting; the act of naming things, transforming objects and things into mnemonic devices that allow us to recall immediately their associative usage, and then cleverly subverting any easy meaning-making through the erasure of context and location.”

Samanta uses fragile rice paper and gouache, materials that bear traces of their history in Shantiniketan and in the work of Abanindranath Tagore. However, he uses pigment instinctively and for its potential to render visual poetry. Working on more than one painting at a time, he creates layers of colour. One could view the compositions in terms of negative and positive spaces; areas that occupy and others that contain. However, every part of the image, these ‘backdrops’ as it were, are as integral a part of the imagery as the objects that are composed within them.

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