It is somewhat difficult to perceive that the late Tollywood actor Soumitra Chatterjee would spring a surprise on Kolkata’s all-and-sundry art viewers. After all these years of showcasing his art, he doubled up as a painter. Will it add another feather to his cap of versatility? Be that as it may, I am going by the recently concluded exhibition Soumitra 89, from 20-30 January 2024, at the Charubasona Art Gallery, Jogen Chowdhury Centre for Arts in South Kolkata. When I arrived on the last day of 30 January, the gallery had an abandoned look, with apparently no viewers or takers of the paintings on display.

Presented under the auspices of the Deepa and Soumitra Chatterjee Foundation, Charubasona, Tapan Sinha Foundation, and Mukhomukhi, the late actor’s art works on display were evidently inspired by Jogen Chowdhury and Rabin Mondal, who perhaps encouraged Chatterjee to forge ahead with an exhibition that was otherwise kept a secret under wraps. It was in the year 2014 when the actor’s maiden solo exhibition was first unveiled at the ICCR’s Abanindra Gallery in Kolkata. Apart from the mounted paintings of the present exhibition, the gallery also showcased another facet of Soumitra Chatterjee’s film and theatre career.

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His prominent presence was showcased in film posters, lobby cards, and costumes once donned by the late actor when he was alive in such films as Fera, Pran Tapasya, Ghatak Bidai, and Satyajit Ray’s Gharey Bairey. Neel Kantha, Homa Pakhi, and Atal Jaler Ahabon included photos from dramatic presentations on stage and even a word processor when the actor-playwright used to put his thinking cap on. Credit should go to Aritjit Moitra of the Tapan Sinha Foundation. Getting down to sizing up Soumitra Chatterjee’s paintings, it would be unfair to criticise his works from a professional level, unlike his involvement in cinema and theatre.

A few of the works on show seemed more like light-hearted doodling, even puerile, which the actor was not too eager to disclose. His film persona must have goaded his veteran art mentors. However,going by the whole corpus of works with 35 miniature paintings, only a few really caught the eyes of art viewers. Chatterjee’s focus was riveted on human faces and animals, some of which appear somewhat grotesque without any serious thought to aesthetics. Watercolour and mixed-media applications figure prominently in his colour palette.

It reminded me of one of the Bards of Bengal, Tagore, who, in his day, also engaged in scribbling and doodling, as the case may be, when there was a mental block in his creativity. But it was a creative madness with a method reminiscent of the ethnicity of Bengal, representing the agony and ecstasy of nature’s connectivity with humanity. Spanish painter Pablo Picasso at one time established himself as a realistic painter and then transcended to cubism and the abstract.

Though Soumitra’s paintings, without honing his strength from a drawing sense and strong draughtsmanship, should be lauded for his bold attempt at conjuring up a riotous colour scheme that fantasises characters drawn not from life but from his own imagination, Caricatures and exaggeration run rife in expressing an inner vision from his own perspective.

The writer is an independent contributor.