Victorian pastoral bliss

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There is something to be said for Victorian plant and garden paintings done by young women and memsahibs along with learning pianoforte as the show by Suddhasattwa Basu and Mala Marwah at Gallerie Espace demonstrates. A strong sense of pastoral bliss, beauty and calm pervades the works,
whose intentionality is to depict the timeless now.
Mala Marwah’s works are mainly botanical studies, done in ink on paper, ranging from black and white studies of trees trunks and the vegetation that they shelter and individual flower types to more colourful studies of the same. Fine draughtsmanship and attention to detail mark these paintings and sketches.
Marwah also creates more elaborate compositions, allegorical and poetic, combining natural and built environment. The porcelain blue patterns of the sky and the blue tiled walls and fixtures that enclose a sehan or courtyard are beautifully delineated in the Night Breeze. A folded fan, a very feminine accessory, with a long tail flies within this space like a kite, and there is a suggestion that it has come out of an open doorway, escaping into the night to breathe and dance in the wind. Other less elaborate small format paintings such as the Entrance to my Village Home are imbued with a sense of nostalgia for physical and imaginative spaces lodged in memory.
The Victorian garden is marked in one Suddhasattwa Basu’s series that features a garden with a bench, overhanging vines of flowers or a Cupid’s fountain. Painstakingly crafted, each of these paintings is marked fresh colours and an aura of bucolic bliss. His other series of paintings on utpala or the blue lotus blooming in shallow lake are more Indian in their thematic and treatment both. The lush aquatic scene is reminiscent of Kushana sculptures such as Sri Lakshmi that have lotus blooms, buds and carps entwined around each other.