Spirits and symbolic languages of art are universal, ever evolving with paradigm of form, technique and materials. The essence of a work reveals itself in an unending, unfolding of its receptivity and endurance, through viewers and the artist’s embrace of the work.
Vinita Dasgupta melds her Bengali heritage and cultural inspirations with transnational iconography and ever evolved more in-depth artistic endeavours. From provoking global pop imagery and diverse iconographic scans her works have expanded through intensive multi-stage creative processes, to a more recent embrace of flora and botanica imagery in recognition of climatic crises. As the artist herself attests that she is ever an explorer and incorporating metaphors in her realms of expression.
One sees Dasgupta’s work of art in a changed context, freed from the curtain of traditional aesthetics which separated absolutely art from non-art. Now she is embracing more naturalistic metaphors and abstract compositions. One that continues to push the boundaries of definition, questioning its external manifestation of form or defined technique and materials. Rather it realigns, mixing the abstract and the unknown with the energy, effort, and inner processes. It depends just as much on the recognition and diffusion of novel and known ideas.
Such elements of emotions lie between the figurative and the abstract, with their own intellectualised and primal system of symbols, evolving into a purer form of personal lexicon embodying a very different conception of art.
Allegory plays a heightened role in Dasgupta’s perception, drawing upon idiosyncratic aesthetics and imagery, she weaves her own tapestries. Inherently based not only upon the reasoning mind but garnering myriad senses, set to evolve and manifest the instinctive forces that lie beneath the surface of consciousness.
The Magic of Descriptive Language
Myriad conversations are a storyteller’s paintbrush. Dasgupta dives into the power of descriptive language, understanding how the choice of paradigms, vivid imagery, and sensory details bring stories to life. She explores and further deploys techniques to embrace the symbolic language of art as a universal one.
Such intense and arduous creative processes involve one’s physical body as well as the psychic and metaphysic entities…To be aware, express, communicate and realize the divine within oneself, one’s surroundings, pleasure and bliss, ideals, hopes and desires. Essentially one’s realization that what one feels should be amplified and shared by all – at any time and any place.
Visual Culture
To explore necessitates a consideration of the meanings of the term 'visual culture' and of the various practices that form its basis; inherently conceptual approaches to the contemporary analysis of visual culture must consider the cultural, social and historical contexts colouring its creation, evolution and appreciation. Art is not, as the metaphysicians say, the manifestation of some mysterious idea of beauty or God; it is not, as the aesthetical physiologists say, a game in which man lets off his excess of stored-up energy; it is not the expression of man's emotions by external signs.
Consider the spontaneity of colours in nature, the myriad shapes and forms. In a seminal work by Matthew Rampley, Exploring Visual Culture: Definitions, Contexts, Concepts (Edinburgh University Press, 2005), the debate about the uses and value of the study of visual culture it explores the limits of visual culture as an interdisciplinary field of study. Certainly, in the 21st century, this continuously addresses alterations in temperament and technique.
Dasgupta’s interpretation of vision ever changes, thus now it is quite chromatic and exciting, another level of colour and energy involvement.
In honour of the power and expansion of creativity beyond any medium, any boundary
Elizabeth Rogers
New York
