What happens when a Chemical Engineer from Orissa decides to teach himself painting?  For two more weeks you can see for yourself at Ramakrishna Bihara’s first solo show at Bose Pacia’s Kolkata gallery.

The exhibition features canvas after canvas of familiar places fantastically distorted as if seen in the reflection of a car’s buffed bumper.  What’s more, the outer space (yes, stars, planets, swaths of milky way etc.) makes a dramatic incision in the majority of the scenes—swirling out of a coffee cup in one painting, or funneling down a landslide in another.  At first, the effect is one of queasy disorientation.  What is going on here?  What exactly is this a picture of, and what’s happened to it?

A closer look reveals that indeed a few different things are happening in many of the canvases.  The distortion is not random—as if an everyday scene had been reflected in a warped mirror, but rather carefully, though mysteriously, aligned with the content of each picture.  In “Book Open on a Bed-Table,” for instance, ribbons of the universe unfurl out of the open pages of a book—a perhaps slightly too literal metaphor for the experience of effective prose?  Or consider “Landslide on the way to Ladakh.”  In this painting the cosmos pours into the crumbling mountainside at the top of the painting and tumbles out at the bottom of the landslide.

Other paintings make use of the distortion of space, but forego the inclusion of outer space, such as “Two Books and a Pillow.”  One of the books appears to be a coffee-table edition of Van Gough’s oeuvre, and if one takes the time to sort out how the little bed room looked before it’s distortion, it ends up feeling a bit familiar—like one in Arles we’ve all seen before.  Yet the telltale florescent light above the bed charmingly suggests 21st century middle-class India as opposed to 19th century middle-class France.

Aren’t we always told that great art captures the universal in the specific?  Even if Bihara took this maxim a little too literally, his show is worth a look.

-- Sophia Powers, Artslant Internation Editor, India

(Images top to bottom: Ramakrishna Behera, Soccer Ball and a Blanket; Ramakrishna Behera, Cup of Coffee; Ramakrishna Behera, Landslide on the Way to Ladakh; Ramakrishna Behera, Two Books and a Pillow.  Images courtesy of the artist and Bose Pacia Gallery)