As an artist, Indrapramit Roy is known to be stimulated by the dialogue between the spatial and the psychological, wherein he explores the relationship between narrative elements. These elements have been a part of his vocabulary, either as ‘parallel moments of inconsequence’ or ‘drama born out of the harsh and complex realities of life on the streets and wastelands of large cities.’

Even before Roy, 58, began his recent series of work — which was on display at the Threshold Art Gallery as part of the solo exhibition titled Soliloquy — he was known as an artist who ‘took away human agency’ from the ‘prime scene of drama’. His paintings strikingly portray vacant streets, solitary trees in vast empty fields, cloudy skies and massive incomplete high-rises at the obdurate moment when they promise to deliver that ‘dream house’, to live in but they do not always follow through.

 

“When days roll into the nights and the nights roll into the next day relentlessly and wait for the light at the end of the tunnel scouring the day’s news, the time is ripe for soliloquies. As such all paintings are, in some sense, soliloquies,” writes Roy in his artist statement with regard to the show and to his experience that led him to creating this body of work. 

During the Pandemic, that began in late 2019, Roy—who is also the current head of the painting department at the Faculty of Fine Arts MSU Baroda—found himself in an awkward position, because on one hand he had gotten a window of time to work at his own pace after a very long period of time, but on the other hand there were people around him suffering and even dying because of COVID. Besides, his students also had to submit their final year work. Hence it was feelings loaded with a mixture of guilt and a bit of pleasure at having time at his disposal, that Roy approached this body of new works. He creates a very striking series of works that take off from his early Quarantine Diary to explore the impact of the lockdown on not just himself as an artist but also the common man.  

It morphed into another set after a couple of months called Quarantine Drawings. In-between there were larger works. The Ordinary Lies, for instance, was triggered by the silence that enveloped the markers of our development paradigm — construction. The frenzy of the relentless occupation of the greens around us came to a grinding halt mid motion. Minus all the bee-hive activity of humdrum construction the stentorian skeleton became a monument to absurdity.

“I wondered, shuddered, questioned and pondered. It is a continuous process. I can’t paint ideas but have to look for what the Californian painter Wayne Thiebaud called ‘what is paintable’. The Quarantine Diaries began as a journal that I wanted to keep on a daily basis,” writes Roy. 

Staying in the suburbs in Baroda, Roy has been witnessed to the laborious building of high-rises and malls but with the pandemic and its impact on migrant labour, he saw witnessed the abandonment of the projects and he experienced that sense of isolation that he so craved as a painter but as a member of an active social network of artists and students of the faculty, knew of the impact it was having on the lives of not just the students and the faculty but the migrant labour itself.  

Interestingly Roy, switched over from the print-making discipline to painting, while he was still a student at Kala Bhavan Santiniketan, (1982-87) to doing his painting (MFA, 1987-89) at the Faculty of Fine Arts of M.S. University of Baroda, where he also teaches now. Subsequently he was awarded Inlaks Scholarship to study MA Painting (1990-92) at the Royal College of Art, London, which included a term at Cite des Arts, Paris. He also spent a term in Berlin on an Erasmus Exchange Scholarship. While this travel and exposure has affected his artistic vocabulary he does stay true to his inner musings and concerns. 

Roy is also known for his engagement with mixed media and collage incorporated. This earlier work reflects a concern with surfaces which could be scored, rubbed, punctured or folded to involve a constant state of decision making, layering and change. Clarity occurred at random intervals in selected objects or symbols defined with specific relish, creating a set of clues, which admitted a sparse readability. The paintings remained, however, 'repositories of memories, aspirations, dreams and desires' expressing a whole range of associative or opposing meanings.  

Recently, he has returned to watercolours, imposing upon himself a discipline that demands accountability of every stroke of the brush, thereby minimizing chance happenings. It is also the first time that Roy has used text in his work, poetic snatches and thoughts—an inner dialogue that he shares with us his viewers. His paintings remain ‘repositories of memories, aspirations, dreams and desires'.