Some questions keep reappearing and the answers to them remain elusive.

I can sense that an attempt to arrive at an answer should be very important. At least an answer that might provide a route map to move forward, an answer that will throw some light on decisions regarding what is acceptable and what is not. But it remains hard to come by.

The clash between my beliefs that I hold dear, the belief that seek a stable order of good and evil; and the conundrum of the world of visuals that I inhabit, which keep changing and shifting goal posts almost daily; is a fact that I have to live with. It is a loosing battle. What seems right and believable today feels false and hard to believe in tomorrow. Social, economic and political positions mutate and throw up difficult questions. I face a mirror seeking answers to them. My imagery appears out of this churning. Some of them eventually get painted and acquire a concrete shape. Assortments of such images are presented here in the hope that seeing them together might lead to some meaning. The works are the questions or perhaps the one question that I ask myself over and over again. Therefore all the works in this show might also be seen as one work.

I would not like to venture into extrapolating what exactly is the meaning of each painting, whether a statement lurks in every nook and cranny, or what might be the significance of a particular image. Significance can’t be cooked up when I am still looking for them. All I can say is these reflections are grounded in my surroundings evolved from my quotidian experience and are not exactly products of an over-heated imagination in search of the bizarre. I would like to believe that viewers might recognise the familiars in them.

How I really wish I had the simple faith to believe that whatever is happening is only for the best or ‘que sera sera’ – whatever will be will be! No prizes for guessing that there are times when I too am deeply tempted to believe in such axioms. That would be quite a relief from the perpetual anxiety; a balmy thought, but let me confess that I suffer from a disability, or one may call it a malaise; I believe there is a major problem somewhere, the sums are not exactly adding up.

For sure the rationalists would make short work of my faith in a better world with their pointedly logical arguments in no time. They would mock the dream as a romantic utopia, but what am I to do? The blockhead in me simply refuses to cheer a world so ‘dreamless’. It is not as if there are no known remedies for this old malaise. The problem is that neither Marxism, Maoism, Che Guevra, nor IT, Nano, a bull-run of the market, or Ayodhya, Feng-shui, nor even Hanuman Chalisa for that matter, seem to offer a cure. The symptoms are getting acute complicating the case further.

Painting is my last resort. The doubts and omnipresent questions whose unremitting persistence could drive your closest well-wisher nuts might be asked with complete impunity in a pictorial space. In here the urgency to seek an answer does not translate into an obligation to provide it. They actually lead to more images.

From the viewer, I seek indulgence in excusing me from the onerous task of defining whether these images are direct or indirect, complex or easily comprehensible, Modern or Postmodern, cutting edge or insipid. What is important however is to know whether they reflect the questions that are formed in my encounter with the world around me in day to day life? I would be satisfied if these images encourage you to raise some questions of your own.

Debraj Goswami