Are you free to think? Think again…..

Why would an artist take the pain of painting if he can click a shot and create art. The gap that remains between photography and photorealism is that, photography binds us to capture what we see before us. It only allows the liberty in changing the angles, hence the points of view. But art gives one, the liberty to shape the vision, shown by nature to ones own.

The clear articulation of Sagar Bhowmick’s work speaks for the effectiveness of the style itself. Reality of the artist’s mind does not converse with the viewer by the multilayered expressionist opaqueness. But it takes us back to the tradition of cave paintings when man imitated nature, to preserve memories of their habits and habitat. The difference is the intellect of a 21^st century artist’s mind and a prehistoric cave dweller’s mind. The subject has changed from memories of habitat to the memories of identity. The identity of an individual , with its tints and shades.

The idea of freedo

m echoes repeatedly in Sagar Bhowmick’s work. As if they ask the question, are we free, to see, look and think? Above everything, to live? Can anybody really move out of one’s contemporary cultural hegemony and think beyond the line of control? Again it is the question of curbing the freedom of an individual by one’s own self and by the society. Possibly that is the reason he needed photorealism as his medium. He wanted to change the lights and angles shown by nature and wanted to light them up himself and make the viewer find the difference.  For instance in his work, But for the grace of God 1, he relates the existence of God for the underprivileged. The fatalist approach to life, is shown through the beggar’s life, who lives on alms granted by people by chance or pity. We relate to God by his miracles, but this work portrays it through his injustice. 

A Scene from Childhood is shown in blue as a distant joy of innocence and the joy of being free to fulfill wishes. In  The Onlooker, he breaks the cliché of people gathering around and enjoying  a scene of quarrel. He assigns that role to a sparrow. Though it appears passive to us, but the bird not passive to itself. Again the question of freedom of expression comes up in this context.

The works force us to think about the highly communicative heroes of the world of the artist. The photographs transform themselves to individual symbols, thereby strengthening the process of osmosis in the border of illusion and reality.

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You can find more of his works at http://www.aakritiartgallery.com/works.php?id=336.