Rabin Mondal: The Tyranny of Power is housed at booth M-10 at Art Dubai 2022

The 1970s was a period of despair for Rabin Mondal, filled with a sense of acute horror and dismay at the manner in which society was being inveigled by people in positions of authority. The manipulation was naked, sordid, and Mondal took to introspecting with a series of drawings that he says he did not consider sequentially, at least not till he saw a pattern emerge that he then considered converting on to canvas to depict the venal actions of those in positions of power. This, the King series, covers a number of works, and ends with one outside the suite of eight works under discussion here: Man Acting as King, a painting he made in the early 1980s as a culmination of the eight works from this series depicted here. The paintings all have the Rabin Mondal distinctiveness—an almost tribal sense of motif making with human features that are exaggerated to appear subhuman or ape-like, a distortion that depicts the innermost depravity of those who abuse power, their clawed feet and unclothed body adding to the sense of grotesqueness.

Yet, however potent the content, Rabin Mondal claimed to be ‘much more interested in the visual aspect of the painting’, which appears pictorially as a fear of loneliness. Mondal used the chequered floor tiles and closing walls to create a sense of being choked, recreating a sense of doom at least as potent as Edvard Munch’s The Scream. Mondal’s King’s power appears tertiary and opposed to the very forces of nature that have created him, thus setting him up for his eventual fall and destruction.