Charcoal On Paper Painting

Samir Aich is a tireless experimenter and has been busy accomplishing apparently impossible things. He has sought to 'figurate' abstract concepts such as the primordial force of Nature, or its earthly counterpart, the animal spirit. Earlier on, his work depicted these concepts in the shape of a variety of awe - inspiring imagery. Such depictions of elemental mass and energy provided the viewer an initial cue to the inner world of this indefatigable painter, he soon shifted his plane of visual expression by endeavoring to accomplish another near impossibility, namely articulating in terms of the black pigment covering virtually the whole of the canvas space. One finds an echo of what the great Turner had tried to do when he wanted to picturize the night itself.

The canvas is first uniformly painted and light is then introduced onto this surface by regular patches of white, green, red ochrea s and then effacing it, which are then usually successively veiled by later application of dark but transparent wash. Like toned varnishes, these subsequent patches not only reduce the whites and make them recede in shadow, but their liquidity responds to the material texture of the canvas and curdles into the weave and seductive lines, restoring its physical presence. The other part of the oeuvre is in his extraordinarily sensitive modulation of tints and shades.