Reversing Roles by Johny M L Art Critic, Writer For the last few years, Shovin Bhattacharjee has been experimenting with the images of urban architectures in his paintings. Towering edifices structured to create the urban settings, in their totality functions as a ‘body’; private and public. They behave like organisms capable enough to possess, control and structure the human beings who come into contact with them A closer look at the recent paintings of Shovin would reveal his evolution to accommodate existential issues of contemporary human beings. Human celebration becomes the point of departure for Shovin in his latest series. He makes a conscious attempt to reverse the order of things. Now the architectures are contained in the human body, with well defined contours. A man is seen walking towards his work place while the architecture is seen either reflected or contained within his body. We almost witness a city on the move. In another painting, we see a happy couple dancing while their bodies look like construction of wavy architectural spaces. The fluid presence of architecture is one of the techniques that Shovin has been using for quite some time to make urban architectural spaces more and more transparent. Transparency becomes an illusionary notion as the glass facades of these architectures do not exactly show us what is happening inside; on the contrary they give back our own distorted reflections pepped up with the wavy and wiry reflections of the surroundings. In this sense, the undulating architectural reflections seen on the bodies of the people are not architectures but reflections of the same on the human body. In this reversal of roles, Shovin transposes the role of human being in an urban setting, now less menacing unlike in his early works. With careful selection of images, Shovin contests the notion of human beings as the innocent victims of urban proliferation. He, through his works, poses a pertinent question: Haven't human beings actually become reproducers of the very same oppressive ideology, which we have been fighting till recently? He does not give an answer as he knows that the answer lies in the minds of viewers witnessing his works.