Hungarian art — aesthetic discourses
The `Masters and young talents from Hungary’ exhibition at Sumukha (January 16 to 29) presents about a dozen contemporary artists from Pecs, an important cultural centre in that country. The collection, which has works by representatives of different generations, has been organised around the ideas of teacher-student relationship and dialogue about the use of aesthetic languages. If the former part of it does not quite come through, at least for the Indian viewer, the latter, formal deliberations, becomes central indeed towards both indifferent and very absorbing effects. The senior Erno Tolvaly examines, evokes and fleshes out a diversity of formal and atmospheric visualisations of a verbally described nude in scenery interpreted by five different painters.

Permeated by art-historical allusions, the conceptual ingredient blends here with workmanship matter. The other older artists: Ferenc Lantos and Istvan Bensik in an evidently current manner, if limited to form, deal with the heritage of geometric abstraction in painting and of modernist simplification in sculpture. Painter Karoly Hopp-Halsz in a more interesting and thought-provoking way introduces figuration into it. The spectator may respond much better to the work of middle-age and younger artists whose aesthetic references are freer, more individual and inherently linked with their involvement with the topics. Ferenc Varga's immense hawthorn drawing dialogues with the Far-Eastern canon, while his installation about stone contact lenses has much reflective gravity. Evocative realism and concept interact intrinsically in the series of diminishing canvases on forest ecology by Istvan Losonchy. Excellent landscape abstractions under Peter Somody's hand come with both a distance of thought and a calm, intimate tactility. Elements of digital imagery are transformed with serious wit and with a disturbing kind of excitement by Sandor Piczehelyi and Rita Varga who deal with social issues, although they bring the sense of stylistic déjà vu. This impression does not disappear in the otherwise interesting and playfully engaging sculptural images by Dora Palatinus and Klara Orosz which invite or suggest viewer participation and bodily sensations. The photographic and video contributions of Tibor Gyenis and Zsolt Keserue address central processes of their reality while being conscious of formal harmony as well as its problems. The documentation-basis of the second and the not so familiar here Hungarian housing subject make it perhaps less accessible and self-restricted. One wonders in the end, whether the focus on local specificity and formal questions was the best channel to offer insight into contemporary art of Hungary. One would have expected more focus on stronger individual voices on issues both local and universal.

Bengal — mid-level
The twelve painters in the `Best of Bengal’ show curated by Akumal Ramachander for Galerie Karma (January 9 to 15) turned out to be mid-level to put it mildly. Equipped with sound, but not outstanding, technical skills, these artists utilise the same to provide variants within over-familiar, old-fashioned and rather commercially oriented style-themes. Pradip Pradhan and Saikat Maity offer lightened academic renderings of ethnic types and vistas, whereas Swapan Saha and Sudipta Tewari add a decorative mostly modernist prettiness to it. Diptish Ghosh Dastidar forcibly tries to be original and contemporary, whereas Dhiren Sasmal makes figuration cute and Pradip Das abstracts it design-like. The landscapists Subrata Sen, Sujit Ghosh and Rajib Bhattacharjee oscillate between the literal and the patterned. Sudhanghsu Bandopadhyay and Arunava Mondal lean towards Abstract Expressionist ways and indistinct fresher means remaining, nevertheless, surface-bound.

Meandering Buddha
Karma Tenraba young artist from Sikkim, may be genuinely inspired by Buddhism and its message of serenity in communion with nature. Whatever he is looking for in his series "The eternal seeker" (Mahua, Leela Palace, January 12 to 19), the images come through as pleasantly indulgent, if not loud, decorative compositions. Simple, contrasting colours laid on the flat create cut out resembling silhouettes of the immobile Buddha surrounded by symbols, floral and vegetal motifs and curving, meandering or radiating lines of connectedness. Although the latter are supposed to evoke illumination, they merely stay on the surface of the fairly obvious design-meaning. The single sculptural work follows the same approach being an actual even cut-out.

Formalist gamut
The eight Kolkatans of the "Spectrum Artists' Circle" who showed at the CKP (January 11 to 17), brought another range of predictability, although this time with somewhat more authenticity, better workmanship and some attempts at a current-day expressiveness.

Avoiding clearly dated idioms, Rabin Datta, Sukumar Das, Biswajit Mondal, Murari Mohan Basu and Samir Saha move between expressiveness, exaggeration and stylisation but strive to convey human turbulence, the last-mentioned displaying consummate graphic qualities.

Pattern-basis can be seen with cuteness in Tarun Banerjee and at a quietly decorative angle in the abstracted landscapes of Anjan Sengupta and Anupam Karmakar.

Collaged patterns
Subramanian, a mid-generation painter from Chennai who lives in the city, is displaying his new works at Kynkyny (January 7 to 26). The new seems to be quite like the previous here.

The artist has a vast array of canvases depicting lovely native ladies and deities using his mainstream technique of collaging fragments of glossy magazine photographic reproductions and pigmented areas. Although his style can be instantly recognised, it only constitutes a variation on the Cholamandal indigenism mingled with decoratively employed motifs from the tradition and from vaguely absorbed modernist abstract ways. Designing and vibrant texturing dominate the composition both in the manner in which the artist puts together a multitude of photographic motifs and in the manner of brushing which combines softly modulated fields and more distinct patterns. The whole held by pronounced linear contours has a simplicity close to the prettified, which is enhanced by the recurring sweet mouths. The fact that the faces are made of sky images hardly means innovation.