Suman Dey’s second solo is a meditation on the passage of time – the result of a man perceiving his surroundings to the fullest. Pouring forth from an artist who has lived in a city all his life, the paintings featured in this exhibition gather his ordinary everyday experiences in urbanity and weave them into something extraordinary.
A self-taught artist, Suman Dey has developed a distinct abstract language, previously centred on personal memories, family, and the circumstances of his upbringing. In this current set of works, however, there is a noticeable shift in subject, colour, and most significantly, format. The paintings here are an ode to the sacred act of noticing. As Dey navigates his urban existence, he notices traces of time everywhere. He sees stains left on a wooden table by an overfilled earthen cup at a roadside tea shop, remnants of posters torn off public walls to make space for newer advertisements, marks of bygone years on old buildings, insects and creatures of the earth making their presence known amidst the bustle of the city, elements of nature being systematically erased by rampant urbanisation. These otherwise unremarkable yet indelible sights – of forms, flora, and fauna – constitute the basis of Dey’s recent works. As he pays close attention to the phenomena that make up the city, so do we. We are, after all, what surrounds us.
In pursuit of documenting the memories and traces left by his interactions with certain physical spaces and natural forms, a new format emerges in the polyptych works presented for the first time in this exhibition. By arranging smaller, fragmented parts to make a whole, Dey welds together diverse, heterogeneous elements – images, sights, signs, and emotions – within a single artwork. This act of amalgamation mirrors the fragmentation of both city structure and urban memory owing to rapid and relentless expansion. With this, he holds together notions of celebration and decay, memory and loss, all at the same time.
The title of this exhibition takes inspiration from Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke, famously known for describing concrete subjects experienced in everyday urban life. In September 1903, on a visit to Rome, he reflects on his experience of the city – the surrounding dilapidated structures that to him were “no more than chance remains of another time”. He later realises their significance and corrects himself: “[...] one says to oneself: no, there is not more beauty here than elsewhere, and all these objects, continuously admired by generations and patched and mended by workmen's hands, signify nothing, are nothing, and have no heart and no value—but there is much beauty here, because there is much beauty everywhere.”
Rilke’s words resonate deeply with Suman Dey’s vision. His paintings capture the city’s quiet insistence, revealing the richness of its small, often overlooked details. Stretching across the gallery walls, they embrace the visible world, observing its traces with care. In their quiet attentiveness, beauty lingers, subtle and profound.
