SAMIR AICH

Samir Aich is a tireless experimenter and has been busy accomplishing apparently impossible things. He has sought to 'figurate' abstract concepts such as the primordial force of Nature, or its earthly counterpart, the animal spirit. Earlier on, his work depicted these concepts in the shape of a variety of awe – inspiring imagery. Such depictions of elemental mass and energy provided the viewer an initial cue to the inner world of this indefatigable painter, he soon shifted his plane of visual expression by endeavoring to accomplish another near impossibility, namely articulating in terms of the black pigment covering virtually the whole of the canvas space. One finds an echo of what the great Turner had tried to do when he wanted to picturize the night itself.

The canvas is first uniformly painted and light is then introduced onto this surface by regular patches of white, green, red ochre’s and then effacing it, which are then usually successively veiled by later application of dark but transparent wash. Like toned varnishes, these subsequent patches not only reduce the whites and make them recede in shadow, but their liquidity responds to the material texture of the canvas and curdles into the weave and seductive lines, restoring its physical presence. The other part of the oeuvre is in his extraordinarily sensitive modulation of tints and shades. After having reduced his colour to no more than a scale of values, he pursues tonal painting with fervour and discipline valourizing the activities of his mind, evaluating, weighing and balancing the relative strengths of all that it encounters in its search for order and the unresolved complexities. The erased areas between them have taken on a new resonance that pushes us to the figurative markers. The paintings work best when the salient elements are all held in tension on the same plane, with no element appearing to overlap or underline any other. This gives the paintings that quality of a world whose contents might be said to be suspended in a simultaneous presentness of being.

The flat paint body seem less important than tone, an effacement of one layer followed by another setting a vector, shadow set against deeper shadow, Aich plots the position of objects around the nudes, marking the points where their forms reflect, intersect or overlap, the frame within the frame diverges instead of converging. Humans float through his works in gay abandon with a fluidity assuming now one form ,now another illuminating areas as vivid streaks of lighting descending into a light drizzle, a kind of lunar aesthetics growing on the viewer as our own experience abides in another pictorial space.

A critical reading of Aich’s drawings, paintings however might lead one to define them being as pictographically expressionistic- a faithful adherence to expressionistic- figurative markers, seemingly innocuous portrayals of still objects and at times a mingling of both on a single canvas, is not to be viewed simplistically as work of an incurable romanticist that yields several possibilities, in turn giving rise to polemical queries that demands a sort of substantiation. A previous figurative series takes into account the complex manipulation of space in his works- large areas of a flat delineation of pigment act as a catalyst to the simplification of techniques to a form of abstraction.