Rajesh Deb (1979, Dharmanagar, Tripura) is an artist who sees political overtones in everyday life. He exposes the social and political concerns of his time and constructs a satirical universe that runs concurrently with reality. By conjuring up disturbing pictures, he removes the veil on the many worthless features of today’s world. A Rabindra Bharti University art student of B.V.A and M.V.A in Calcutta from the year 1998 to 2005, the artist was a student under the mentorship of Partha Pratim Deb, who unobtrusively revealed the secret delights of creative inventions of art to every interested student. Partha Pratim had a little discernible impact on Deb, and a closer examination revealed his mentor’s influence.
When the pandemic hit, it drove individuals to evaluate and re-assess their objectives, resulting in considerable change, and making the forced ‘stop’ look like a silver lining. The moment to contemplate appeared to flee as the daily grind continued. When it came to choosing a humour-inducing method, Rajesh Deb as a free thinker chose what he needed to inherit for himself, and he relied on appropriation and adaption of recognised traditions. His recent work showcases the new collection of his woodcuts, ink works, and artist books that are on the display at the Art Heritage, New Delhi (March 20, 2022 – April 16, 2022) under the Title: Neverland Post Office Recent works, 2022.
When the pandemic hit, it drove individuals to evaluate and re-assess their objectives, resulting in considerable change, and making the forced ‘stop’ look like a silver lining. The moment to contemplate appeared to flee as the daily grind continued. When it came to choosing a humour-inducing method, Rajesh Deb as a free thinker chose what he needed to inherit for himself, and he relied on appropriation and adaption of recognised traditions. His recent work showcases the new collection of his woodcuts, ink works, and artist books that are on the display at the Art Heritage, New Delhi (March 20, 2022 – April 16, 2022) under the Title: Neverland Post Office Recent works, 2022.
His artworks titles diversify his medium of expression such as “Footnote of History (2021-22)”, “Two Pice Tukre Tukre Mom (2020)”, “No Man’s Land (2020)”, “Dream of Neverland (2020)”, “Everything Happened in Neverland”, “Tear Master Crocodile (2020)”, “International Gudgudi Diwas (2020)”, “Perhaps My Mom is Ghost-Peethia (2020)”, “Taxfree Voo Voo (2020)”, “Asifa Marg (2021-22)”, “Black Paradise (2020)”, “Democrazy Now (2022) Kissing the Migrant (2020)”, “All Are Under the Unlawful Activities (2020)”, “Near the Jhelum (2020)” and so on, depicts his return (although in a new shape) in order to entice us and to participate in self-reflection in a bigger context once more. Neverland Post Office is a follow-up to Deb’s Testimony of Tolerance solo exhibition (Art Heritage, 2018), which examined identity in the context of historical figures and events. Neverland Post Office frees the viewer from historical constraints, creating a series that explores themes of reinvention, separation, and belonging. It relies on J M Barrie’s “legendary Neverland”, and Kashmiri-American poet Agha Shahid Ali’s collection of poetry “The Country Without a Post Office” to invite audiences to consider the absurdity of pre-pandemic and post-pandemic periods, as well as their own behaviours. The Neverland series presents a location that is both free of the passage of time – timeless – and literally a place whose existence and identity have been wiped, based on the notion of seeing imagination as a site of resistance. “Such a location can’t have an identity,” Deb explains, “and hence can’t have a post office.” Deb’s universe, however, is not wholly fantasy, as he incorporates aspects and individuals from the actual world into new types of “hallucinations. “If objects in the actual world are blended into a new shape to generate new meaning, are they meaningless or do they represent the sum of their parts?” Deb poses a question. The show has been constructed as a space of inquiry, both of the self and of the world we live in, in keeping with the artist’s open-ended approach. The designer of this show Amal Allana has offered the spectator…
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