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Fragment du texte "Le dépassement de la problématique de l’art et de la pratique des rites" par Jean-Marc Poinsot , Art historian,  catalogue "Debesh Goswami", exposition 2008, Galerie Oniris, Rennes, France.  

«Artists like Debesh Goswami, must propose in opposition to all these collective constructions belonging to today’s dynamics, vision and way of working that redistributes the tasks between different forms of expression, be they those of the people, or those of the specialists whose esthetic signs are more vague. ...
Debesh Goswami shows us such weird shapes that we find familiarly alive. We can decipher these tangles with the help of a few images. As like in 2006, as us not to fonder, not to loose one’s self in the contemplation of pure form as John Coplans world do with his the close-ups of his body exposed to the photographic lens and irregularly centered. Yogalava/Academy world like the school of form to be also the school of life at least that one question about the space between these two disciplines.
The dividing line between Art and Nature, between Body and Soul, do not pass through the same space, the same configuration, depending on which side if the Indus it is. Once again Debesh Goswami world like to evoke an image that covers the length of this flexible border.

Fragment du texte " Passage de l'Inde" par Nicolas Bourriaud, Art historian,  catalogue "India",       exposition 2007, Muée d'art modern.  Moscou Russie.

........"Young artist who have assimilated the most contemporary formats of the image such as Debesh Goswami, question India from the tool box that the avant-gardes of the '60s and the '70s have shaped. Thus the subtle materials and the organic references of Debesh Goswami intersect the American minimalism (in particular the fragility of the compositions of a Keith Sonnir) and the modest forms of naked life.Aren't these signs of indianness at the end of the day the Great Other of Indian artists, the impalpable strength, impossible to put in shape, to which they address the shapes, that they trace out? If surrealism were to see in the unconscious the absolute otherness, in the lines of the Rimbaldian verb (" I is another"). The Great Indian Other is to be sought within himself."

Fragment du texte " La plongée dans le paysage breton" par René Le Bihan, Conservateur de musée de Brest,catalogue, exposition 2006 Renne

"The body is at the core of Debesh Goswami's work. An Indian artist living in France,the body in question - his won, in the event - is also, perforce, a foreign body, notwithstanding the universal aspiration for which it is the vehicle. The 'foreign - ness', to western eyes, would reside in Goswami's familiarity with certain Indian techniques for affirming the body’s sentience, notably, yoga; the meta -physical ambition lies in a forgetting of the body with a view to attaining a state of spiritual gracefulness.Hence the contemplative tenor of Goswami's work, and its recourse to the simplest of substances such as mud, ash, flour. For the mundane aspect of these substances, the fact that they form an ephemeral second skin on the body to which they have been anointed, is the precondition for the supra - mundane 'aura', the breath or respiration of an absence, that he could like these traces - preserved in photographs and on video - to be an imitation of.

Fragment du texte  par Pierre-Damien Huyghe, Professeur, Université  Paris I. 2001

For Debesh GOSWAMI, the mold is in short always present, always at work, persistent. Thus the work does not exhaust its form, unlike the technical object which always ends up constituting an adequate response to its project ... space and time would remain continuously one in the other, allowing a reputed spatial practice such as sculpture to welcome temporality, not as what would wear it down, destroy it or come to the end of it. 'it, but like its promise (hence the value given to the temporary carpets of crushed bricks in Mr. Goswami's practice), likewise the visible is passage for the invisible in this sense: "the invisible is not than a passing state, the day becomes passage when the night arrives (...). The invisible is the negative of the visible "

Fragment du texte "Un lieu nommé corps"par Anne Kerdraon, professeur honoraire à l'université Rennes 2,  catalogue "Un lieu nommé corps", exposition 2008, Galerie Helene Lamarque, Paris.

"The body surrounds itself with , or is accompanied by,object and materials that illustrate the methods and rituals proper to the accomplishment of the spiritual project. Krishnamurti taught that the principle quality of the artist resided not in the skill or cunning of his technique , but in his state of wakefulness and vigil, which renders him alert to the endless chain of causes and effects; the effect becomes the cause that will provoke a new effect and so on and so forth.....In a continuous movement and the adaptation to new artistic means, at the closest proximity to local customs, and with a consciousness of traditions and history, the artistic practice of Debesh Goswami weaves links between the past and the present, eternity and transience.   ...then, time conditions the entire oeuvre of Goswami ,the spectator must take care to understand what lies above  and beyond the visual immediacy of his images. Simplicity transcends cultural differences; the symbolism Goswami transmits and evokes allows the spectator (even Breton) to draw from its meaning.Konrad Fielder wrote that "The essence of art can be reduced to a  very simple formula :elevate the intuitive conscience of its state of obscurity and involvement to a state of clarity and determination. "

Fragment du texte " L’espace du milieu: paysages du corps et nature morte"par Deborah Jenner, professeur , Critique d'art , Paris, catalogue "Un lieu nommé corps", exposition 2008, Galerie Helene Lamarque, Paris.


""Many of his installations combine scattering granules with the more graphic technique of stencilling. However, instead of depicting an entity, he deposits a residue around cut-out shapes thereby tracing the limits between presence and absence. Yet, here, form and emptiness are reversed: An ironic reality innate in stencils that only reinforces the mystical message of the Prajnaparamita (Form is non other than emptiness.  ) Such installations demonstrate man’s presence on earth. While only an ephemera passage, he leaves his imprint on all else to come.The artist himself becomes the object of his own creation. Laying on the floor his silhouette locks the cloud of finely powdered brick depositing a thin film all round. Lifting up one arm, he punctuates the scene by exposing a bit of the pale blue floor below which had been covered over by his body. The spectator peering down gets the impression that he may just be gazing up towards the sky. The particular posture of the fallen figure makes it look ready to spring back as the title, Emancipation, suggests. Is it an lcarus in reverse negating the primordial Fall off Man? "

Fragment du texte " L'ambiance de Goswami :L'éternel et transitoire"par, Abul Mansur , Prof d'Université Chittagong, catalogue " ambiance", Bangladesh National Museum, Dhaka, Bangladesh.

""National Museum shouldered responsibility of arranging an exhibition of sculptures by Debesh Goswami scheduled t called Ambiance which reflects the artist's concern with nature and vegetation. What I could gather from reproductions of his works is that the artist's prime objective seems to be a kind of transformation of the transient natural world into a form and idea, which transmits a feeling beyond reality.The artist endeavours to reveal the fleeting nature of existence and identity, present them as but a fragment of an infinite journey, as transient and ephemeral manifestations of the life eternalAt the same time, it incarnates the laws of evolution and regeneration. The use of branches evoke the feeling of fragmented bodies- the transitory, the ephemeral, but the use of another material suggests the transformation and arrests the evolution and thus gives meaning to the shapes. Removal of the outer bark of the branch and revelation of the inner core indicate the outer and inner manifestations of existence. These fragmentations also give hints of the life in exile and a break from cultural origins.These,Debesh's works reveal a complex world of a creative person who is negotiating an existence between origin and exile, and transient and eternal".

Fragment du texte " Les métamorphoses du temps " par Pierre Maxime Jedryka, Critique d'art, catalogue     Trois métamorphoses, Peter Briggs, Debesh Goswami et Naoyuki Kanahyo, Joué-les-Tours, France.exposition 1999   

"What the work of Debesh Goswami reveals  precisely is this: a suspended time, where we' feel the perception of this re-established harmony, in the inter-corporeity, on the infra thin surface where the various positive and negative mouldings are printed, the forms and the empty space join virtually, as on an invisible surface, the forms of time.It is a bridge between visible matter and its possible metamorphoses. The bridge is not one-way .The movements are made in both senses past > future, future > past. Debesh Goswami allows us to reach the feeling of the temporary, the impermanence, fragility, to see better, to feel better the time of the metamorphoses, beyond the illusions of control and power."

Fragment du texte par Shaheen Merali, conservateur, écrivain. 
Londres, catalogue "" Cloak and Dagger, les temps fictifs de l'Inde"", exposition, Zuzeum Art Centre, Riga, Latvia 2021,   

"Using unusual and evocative materials, the Indian born French artist Debesh Goswami offers the viewer a focussed lens with which to engage the vast array of frameworks and disciplines through which to engage the fragility of the world.   ....
The work is highly evocative, modern as well as contemporary art from France as well as India which shares the history of colonised and colonial. As the curator and writer of Cloak and Dagger, India’s fictional times, currently on view at the Zuzeum Art Centre, Riga, Latvia it was important for me to provide a valid perspective of the privileged and the marginalised in considering both the relation to wealth and population, one that is, increasingly, a place for activist intervention into its crises in the global liberal order. I commissioned Goswami immediately and was delighted to receive his proposal which provided a non-didactic address of historical mediation between Europe and the rest of the world.

© 2022 by Debech Goswami

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