Ritendra Roy
19th May to 19th June
Aakriti Art Gallery

Years ago, as a student of the under-graduate class of painting at Calcutta's Rabindra-Bharati University, Ritendra Roy had painted a 'still life with flowers in a vase on table-top, as an academic must-do, albeit with an unusual variation, in which the cast-shadows of the foliage appeared as weighty and as 'real' as the flowers and foliage in the vase, as well as of somewhat different in character than the matters of which those were shadows. But what about his penchant for painterly resolution of contrasts which seems to have a deeper basis in a wish for integration of phenomenologically conflicting elements. In the classical geometric abstract art there is no room for light-and-shadow play of illusions. But true to Gaganendranath Tagore's heritage, Ritendra depends a good deal on light and shadow play in architecture, with the resultant effect of creating mysterious planes composed of substances, shadows and lights.