Spirits and symbolic languages of art are universal, ever-evolving with paradigms 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. The artist herself attests that she is an explorer and incorporates 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 absolutely separated 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.

Vision (dhyana) emanates within the spatial nature of a higher dimension and therefore is timeless. It transcends thought. The artist does not think through and thereby realize his/her creations; they are visualized spontaneously, largely through a subconscious process, bringing images, feelings, notes, details, and references from all facets of time and life, together in an assimilated amalgam. In this intuitive realm of awareness, one dwells in a limitless present, surpassing mere space and action. Yet, complete delineation in art falls short of the ideal, and one must accept evocation. It is finally left to the viewer to utilize his/her own powers of imagination to carry the flat representation to other levels, for linearity, as such, does not exist. Art renders such impasses explorable, perhaps even shareable, through the interplay of portrayal, visual arrangement, and grouping – blending the material and palette. Imagination interweaves symbols, uncovering lost and active layers, even those with culture-specific meaning. As C.C. Jung wrote and noted throughout his legendary work on dreams, universal symbols exist, in truly disparate cultural nexuses across time and the world.

Such elements of emotions lie between the figurative and the abstract, with their own intellectualized 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. It is 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 and 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; 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, with another level of colour and energy involvement.

In honour of the power and expansion of creativity beyond any medium, any boundary…