Thinking Out-of-the-Box: Prantik Chattopadhyay

The colourful hand-painted square box is a wonderful ‘organizer’ that opens out to reveal three compartments, each one fairly spacious enough to hold ‘girly’ stuff of everyday use – costume jewellery, hair clips and bands, make-up stuff. And then closes, with the compartments snugly stacking on top of one another, to become a compact little item that sits happily on the dressing table or cupboard.  

Prantik’s box reminded me of my grandmother’s rectangular ‘toilet’ box whose lid would slip-turn to reveal a mirror fixed under it, which she would look into while combing her hair and putting on her kajal and sindoor-bindi. The box held all kinds of things – a couple of different combs, hair-bun clips, ribbons, sindoor dibbi and kajal dibbi, safety pins. It was such a fantastic design!

Prantik is a delightful young artist who has never lost an opportunity to use trendy and contemporary materials, products and imagery in his sculptural paintings. He says, “I choose popular images as triggers for my artworks. The works are like satirical narratives that sit on the edge of being social commentaries”. 

The hand-painted Utility Box by Prantik (acrylic and stickers on wood, 15.5 cm x 15.5 cm x 15 cm) is produced as a limited edition by Spark Plug Products, Vadodara, under their project, 0265 (the telephone code for Vadodara), a ‘product laboratory’, launched by Vineet Nair, a local advertising professional, that is working furiously with several young artists based in the city, encouraging them to create ‘artistic’ products that can be manufactured by his firm under quality supervision in limited editions.