Page 376 - Art and Crafts of Bangladesh

SECOND GENERATION ARTISTS 373

of the native country. Kibria’s works in fine arts were only parallel to these efforts. He
had within himself the uncertainty of rootlessness, the memory of famine, communal
violence and partition of India. He could foresee the certain tragedy of the new city
with the vision of an artist. In this way, Kibria wanted to know his own self through
his experience- he became an oriental existentialist artist.
In the mid-seventies the Color-fields started to appear in the works of Kibria. A sense
of claustrophobia and captivity became apparent in these works. The works titled
Ashes (fig. 9.11) had compositions like the cross. The stone like texture within the
tightly arranged square shaped fields became symbols of bad times. The fields with
various degree of blacks and the torn and scratch like textures of their bodies in the
work Painting in Black, (1975) (fig.1.22) give a feeling of suffocation. Two white
fields are engaged in a non-stop battle with the grayness from both sides. These works
seem to be the discourse of the artist’s crisis of existence with his environment. We
remember that perhaps, Kibria saw such dialectics of black and white in the works of
Soulages. But Kibria paints in lifeless black and matte white while Soulages had
worked with shiny black and fluorescent white. Again, we find a discourse of feelings
within the controlled composition in Kibria’s works while Soulages’ work contained
the structureless free flow of paint. In the 70s, another series of works by Kibria titled
Memory try to bring back romanticism within him from the bleakness of
existentialism. What are the memories that trouble Kibria in these works done in
etching? I remember the poem Bhagyaganana (Fortune Telling) by Sudhindranath
Dutt whenever I stand in front of these works. ‘Failure is not the enemy, / necessary
pain is not the enemy; / my enemy is only neutral time, / passage of time, / fearsome,
huge.’ 20 A sense of passage of time is felt in these prints like his collages done much
later in the recent past which bear the stormy seal of the passage of time. The picked
out textured surface, stormy speed of thorny lines bring the sense of different time fig. 9.11 Ashes, oil and
zones and flow of time; somehow we are stuck by the spike of sadness by his etchings collage, 1978
of the Memory series. Now we remember the
works of Spanish artist Tapies.
Kibria’s works again began to change in the 80s.
The solid square fields melt and they become
uneven, indefinite areas. The purity of
composition tends to break but the control
remains very much in the hands of the artist. The
movement of form almost gives us a sense of
vision; we almost enter a sense where we can
understand the truth within the form and color.
From this stage, the works of Kibria start a visual
nurturing and at the same time there appears a
somber, quiet ritual. This dimension transforms
Kibria from a Color-field artist to his own world
of art. Gradually a meditating, abstract language
of art germinates. He achieves tremendous