He takes pleasure in tearing and shearing off papers into minute, uncountable pieces and makes art out of it. It is like best out of waste rehashed. But hang on, no external cutting, scissoring or knifing instrument is used to aid him in his creative process. Using sharp-edged nails and fingers as the only tools, he achieves the unattainable to stun the cauldron of art with exquisite specimens of collage works.
After amusing the City of Joy’s art connoisseurs with his striking array a’coller, Hooghly-based (a district in West Bengal) low-profile artist Tapan Saha now gears up to take Dehradun’s art-fraternity by storm.
At first sight, an art gazer might mistake his eye-arresting oeuvre for canvases of either oil paints or water colours. But a closer look will automatically help him detect the illusion. Bits and strips of papers are ripped off from piles of newspapers and glued to a hard art-board with enough thickness to hold on the collated material over its surface. From tiny fillets as thin as a pencil-line width to broad page-bars, Saha’s pure paper collage weaves out intricate designs and compositions. From objects to landscapes, his a’ coller series has encompassed all. Where precision and pictorial effect perfectly blend, where to-the-point brevity and beauty merge to tell a tale, where accuracy and aesthetics murmur melodies into mesmerised onlookers’ ears, there Saha’s artistic skills speak volumes for his pains and passion for the engaging craft he dabbles in.
But why is the collection called a’ coller? Doesn’t it put in mind, the world-renowned Spanish painter-sculptor Pablo Picasso’s breathtaking collage craft?
“Oh, definitely yes. He only made this term widely popular. For Picasso was a master extraordinaire and his assembled art was a global phenomenon and still stands out in the cauldron of paper collages. The title is a tribute to the genius who first coined the word,” he elucidates.
Exhibited at Kolkata’s Academy of Fine Arts, 23 prismatic pieces mounted up on the walls, the art aficionados couldn’t have asked for more. From the divine Durga series (which is quite topical to the current season as the ten-handed
“Like you have pixels in photography, here you get to see thousands of fragmented paper-chits varying from countable to infinite strengths. In one of the collages, a crow is created by amassing 85 paper-pieces, while a small lantern is conjured up by accumulating 200 pruned pieces. So you may well imagine the other figures and rest of the panoramic vistas,” he notes.
A stickler for purity of art, Saha rightly abstained from diluting the form with his sense of integrity as an honest artist. “I have deliberately not included any other medium or unmatching, foreign ingredients to penetrate this pure collage form. Otherwise, it would disintegrate its rhythm and uniformity. Whenever hues were required, I opted for the coloured portions of newspapers,” says Saha on the well thought-out method.