‘Morphology of Water: A Project by Santanu Debnath’ is a solo exhibition focusing on aqueous landscapes and their civilizational impacts and interconnectedness. Situated around the artist’s village and waterbodies, Debnath explores the fate of natural ponds and other waterbodies and how they diminish from day-to-day life today. Santanu Debnath’s practice is primarily inspired by the mundane scenes from his village and the ordinary lives of the people.
Returning to his village after formal art education from Kolkata, Debnath turns his gaze not toward the spectacular sceneries of the serene village, but towards various aspects that structured communal life. The natural reservoirs of water and ponds were among the first things that caught his attention. His practice excavates the quiet process of ecological erosion, framing these aqueous sites not as nostalgic relics but as contested terrains reflecting the slow change in social and communal life.
From mythical stories of origin to discourses on politico-geographical boundaries, water has been a fundamental and central element of imagination across ages. Specifically, within Indian religious and indigenous cosmologies, water is seen as something beyond a mere resource—an entity with a sacrosanct role and agency. This profound status, however, vanishes in some shared aquatic habitats. While persisting as indispensable sites of ritualistic importance, these same waterbodies are also sites of collective neglect, discarded trash, and societal wastes. Debnath’s works depict these contradictions through different vectors.
Many works meticulously document waterbodies across diurnal and seasonal cycles, revealing water as an essential meter of the rhythm of village life and ecological time. Often reminiscent of romantic and idyllic landscape paintings of the pre-modern style, a significant body of paintings contests this conventional style with subtle undertones of erosion and loss. Though visually stunning and executed with outstanding skill, the silent and ghostly presences of these waterbodies invoke a sense of slow decline in equilibrium and balance.
The intrusion and jarring presence of trash and disposed materials create a deeply disturbing effect that generates dissonance with the idyllic and sacred. In Debnath’s work, these elements are not just signifiers of pollution and environmental erosion but mark a categorical departure from dependency and sacred presence. They either belong to human detritus or non-human living beings. Through this layered portrayal of waterbodies—as both vital and violated—Debnath’s project ultimately presents a poignant reflection on memory, community, and the fragile equilibrium between nature and human life.
