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Arghya Priya Majumdar
Tragedy, unlike humour, holds the position of poetic moralizer as the pinnacle of human drama. The best dramatists, however, are also great comedians. While comedy receives less theoretical investigation, a great moralizer knows that tragedy and comedy are inseparable. Comedy is often disregarded as pure pleasure, as populist, and as immorally obscene. Triviality vanishes, though, when considering dark humour, or the grim and ironic humour that blends and complicates comedy and tragedy. An obvious concept of comedy focuses on the production of innocent fun and pleasure. This principle is, however, complicated in the art of Arghya Priya Majumdar whose paintings transcend the production of pleasure, using humour as a technique for popular comprehension and focusing on darkness as a critical weapon. As a combination of humour techniques – parody, satire, caricature and cynicism – his paintings compound a simple understanding of humour as merely pleasurable or humour as a political weapon, and are very much a part of a rich and complex tradition of the grotesque in fine art.
The comic humor of exaggeration usually focuses on recognizable characteristics that allow the easy readability of exaggerated images. Distortion at times produces absurd and repulsive images, evolving from the history of the grotesque. The grotesque was meant to be didactic; grotesque comedies taught good manners and discrimination and referenced the evils of man to remind us that it is immoral to act that way. Borrowing the hideous amplification of the grotesque, Arghya Priya criticizes the follies of society by presenting an exaggerated immorality as truth. These works rely on an understanding of normal perception but subvert the expectations of ordinary reality. The intellectual pleasure of comprehending these distortions is generic and common enough that it successfully addresses a broad and popular audience. By moving the exalted ideals of man into an ordinary reality the comic element addresses the lives of common people. While the inherent tragedy may evoke an idealized essence, the comic element mimics and debases those ideals.
Arghya Priya’s engagement with the grotesque is about wielding an instrument of sympathy and satire in order to express the larger social condition. The exaggeration of the demoniac figures becomes a comic technique, a façade for a variety of layered critiques. Essentially, these works challenge the boundaries of art: transgressing, merging, overflowing and destabilizing them. They marry horror with humor and challenge the boundaries of propriety in order to attack the decades of posturing that created this result. They also question the implied morality of society and allude to the implications of animalistic sexuality, desire and excess that are an apparent part of human condition.
In Arghya Priya’s universe, all aspects of life are equal, the
grotesque is as important as the beautiful and the ideal is revealed
as comical. The element of exposure in these works
creates a
layered criticism in imagery and requires moving beyond superficial
interpretations. The complexities within these works are a
reflection of the tensions between layers: between mimicking and
mocking traditional techniques, between embracing the ugly side of
life and chastising the institutions that create this ugliness, and
between creating social commentary while not advocating action.
Arghya Priya plays with these tensions to create visual analyses of
the significance of art history, contemporaniety, sexuality and
politics to name but a few contexts and suggests that life is indeed
like this: an inevitable and grotesque power play between survival
and exploitation; idealism and realism; tradition and progress. |