Santanu Dey’s exhibition in Delhi

If Unseen City, Santanu’s debut show in 2023, introduced an introspective hand that remained plaintively sober over monumental works of paper, canvas, and other ephemeral media, here, the artist is remade, reborn. We are now made aware of an absence, an anger, a violent silence, of all that is green, natural, and nourishing, There is no ‘mother’ here; this is nature that has become tense, brutal, and unwelcoming. It is here, in this unnatural quietude of daily life, that Santanu’s artistic practice emerges: a numbing engagement with environment and ecology, shaped by his personal experience of witnessing the slow violence of urbanisation in his hometown of Kolkata, studying at Vadodara, and living in Delhi. 

This is his world, his ruinous Earth where human suffering and ecological crisis have become inseparable. Yamuna (2025), with its grotesque forms of offal and intestines, raises a river of irrevocable loss, a flood of hunger, starvation, as well as gluttony, leeching on the very land that gave it birth. In such wreckage, the artist scavenges his truest expression in drawing and painting. “Whenever a thought comes to my mind, I have to draw,” he says. Santanu’s artistic impulse is urgent and compulsive, where remnants of brick dust, concrete, and weathered canvases, silent witnesses of human intervention, fragments of a world being incessantly torn apart and remade, become painterly mediums.

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