As a painter and as a person Eleena Banik
is an individualist. But that individualism
has been formed through assimilation of
various trends, various living traditions,
both local and global. The process of internalization
of all these sources in the context of her
sojourn with a feminine self through the
realities around her has bestowed a unique
character in her expressions. A particular
feature of her individuality or originality
has developed out of her association as
a student with the aesthetic, ideological
and natural environment of Santiniketan,
where at Kala-Bhavan of Visva-Bharati she
made her BFA and MFA in 1995 and 1997. The
creative world of Rabindranath, Nandalal
Bose, Binodebehari Mukherjee and Ramkinkar
made great impact on her. The literary philosophy
of Rabindranath, particularly his songs
unfolded to her the enlightened mystery
of the universe, and also her own self.
She was born and grew up in an urban environment
of Kolkata as a lonely child of a working
parent. The experience of that personal
loneliness and violence of a turmoiled city
has always acted as context of her creativity.
As a student of Kala-Bhavan she was very
much attracted to the formal attributes
of Western high-modernism, and to the far-eastern
art. She assimilated these two contrasting
modes in her emotive self formed through
her association with mystic world-view of
Rabindranath and Santiniketan and also through
an existential dilemma of her urban experience.
The result was a series of paintings and
sculptures she executed during her student
days, which were recently exhibited under
the general title 'His / Her Story' and
a second title 'My Voice against Violence
as a Woman'. These works were narrative
in nature reflecting a dramatic contrast
through expression of tragic predicament
of human existence in a troubled world,
executed mostly in cubistic and expressionistic
formal structures.
The present series of paintings that are
being showcased in this exhibition are examples
of her next phase of development after 1998.
After completing her MFA at Kala-Bhavan
she took a course at Glasgow School of Art,
U.K. during 1998-99. That was her first
exposure to a European experience. After
that she made several journeys abroad. The
journey through air opened up to her a vast
panorama of landscape. The flow of rivers
through undulated course has been one of
her recurring themes. She has looked at
the landscape with the awe and wonder of
a child. Mostly her streams of rivers are
in dazzling red. With the innocence of a
child she floats paper boats on the streams.
Several kinds of flowers remain scattered
on water and in the greens of the river-bank,
which she decorates with various folk motifs.
Even the trees are formed by the flow of
undulated lines like 'alpana' of village
Bengal. In these landscapes she comes to
an enchanting amalgamation of eastern and
western aesthetic sensibilities. The rhythms
of Santiniketan reverberate in the air of
modernistic West.
Her sojourns to the Western countries have
unfolded to her some basic dilemma of contemporary
globalised reality. Her reactions have been
two fold. Firstly, she has been nostalgic
of her own country-based existence. Secondly,
she felt rebellious due to her exposure
to a civilization, which has flourished
on the basis of exploitative colonialism.
The first reaction has been expressed in
her of landscapes, where she has contemplated
the bounteous nature beyond any regional
geography and terrain, where rains wash
the land and greens grow in the expanse
of a forest, where she finds her childhood
dreams to come to reality. When she titles
this series as 'Rain Forest', she only enjoys
those dreams with her own self. These landscapes
are lyrical and replete with various decorative
folk motifs. Her artistic consciousness
nurtured at Santiniketan is best expressed
in these landscapes and paintings with tropical
birds and beasts. A representative painting
to cover her second reaction is titled 'The
'The River Bank'. The blue river flows with
flowing paper boats. On the bank the people
of deep red hues with minimal dress are
assembled to enjoy sun-bath. A bikini-clad
lady paints a blue head on a canvas. The
painting reflecting a kind of Matissian
chromatic contrast is an example of her
confronting the Western reality. Beyond
the apparent sonorous beauty a sense of
melancholic void lurks.
A dilemma erupts out of her confrontation
of the two opposing poles of reality. She
makes a synthesis in another kind of dream
emanated from and upholding the subconscious.
She paints mythical subjects where she projects
her feminine self to confront a world, where
all kinds of concepts of equality get trampled
through the onrush of 'power', the 'Power'
that erupts from economic, racial and gender
based domination. Eleena is in that way
a very much socially conscious artist, who
has come to her own during 1990-s, when
Western globalization has arrived at our
country as an exploitative force. Her world
out look has developed out of her rebellion
against this exploitation. Through her forms,
where in some cases she reflects Egyptian
silence and merges it with expressionistic
and oriental folk elements, she has questioned
the dilemma of the shattered existence of
contemporary living and searched for an
island where man/woman can live in harmony
upholding his/her own freedom. She occasionally
slips into dream and fantasy to find that
true norm of existence. Within the diverse
expressions of this series, the search for
an ideal 'Rain forest' of her dream persists.
