'Are you forgetting something?' This very title of one of the paintings of Mrinal Dey could well be used to describe the socio-psychological underpinning of his works. The plump, obese figures with their over-fed looks and a gaudily colored claustrophobic space they occupy tend to suggest right at the outset that they are the objects of scorn for the painter. Mrinal, makes every attempt to induce a sense of loathing, and he does it by employing the technique of apparently contrasting handling of motifs. One the one hand he treats the figures with a corporeality that seems repulsively exaggerated yet real, quasi-expressionistic yet emptied of any emotive power; on the other hand Mrinal goes for a painstaking photographic realism particularly when inert objects, signs and references to familiar present-day symbols are concerned. The overall impression thus created is that of a certain kind of cultural drudgery translated into and passed back to the mundane non-emotive visualities of the contemporary urban world vitiated by a singular self-centered materialistic objective of a crass covetous life. To put it simply, the painter intends to catch our attention to this constricted and deteriorating continuation of today's world in the context of the rapid growth of a mindless humanity craving for material goals only.
As the overweight figures in his paintings become visual symbols of moral and existential degeneration, the single-ness of the fleshy figures in each of his paintings also convey a terrible lack of sagacity, an inescapable burden of excess and an unfortunate isolation. The wretchedness of these dull figures are saved from any sentimental slips by the clever and generous usages of common, universal uni-cultural signs of urban commercial transactions in the form of trading, investment and information such as, bar-code (the astute sign of mechanical pricing), printed instruction signs on packaging boxes (assuring safe shipping if abided by), simulated images of newspaper (referring to a life bombarded with and thus shaped by information and reports), and even medical images taken for clinical investigations.
In the work titled 'Celebrity, Celebrity, Celebrity', apart from suggesting media's wary role in constructing a celebrity (who once again becomes an object of derision because of his voluptuousness and flabby sagging body), Mrinal's succinct use of the motif of a blooming card-board lotus out of which the celebrity is rising up like an icon with six hands holding very contemporary ayudhas like microphone and gun, is a strong indication of both allusion and metaphor. He complicates the image further by inserting the sign of 'recycle' as a reminder of the transientness of this fake iconic moment being enjoyed by the celebrity.
In this painting the card-board lotus is infact a reshaped packing box a recurring motif in Mrinal's paintings. According to him, in the mad rush for achievements, everybody is loosing their space, and eventually forced to live a life compressed and squeezed in a narrow existence. Packaging boxes almost symbolically refer to this pathetic survival continuing at the cost of a larger meaningful perspective. The sense of mockery and gluttony that accompanies most of his paintings perhaps indicates that.