It is a meditation on Noah's Ark with a flurry of excitingly disjointed ideas interlaced in one dramatic tableau; it is the Magnum Opus of Ronni Ahmed.

This 100-foot-long saga, told in an exquisitely surreal language, is the stuff of imagination brought into existence to stimulate the imagination. It is a gargantuan mix of tales told in a hyperbolic code. It is a cerebral action painting that lays its faith on an orgy of seemingly disparate visual elements. A Biblical tale recontextualised to fit into a spectrum of ideas that harp on personal fantasy and collective memories, the acrylic on canvas is titled, "The Archeology of Noah's Arc".

Coursing through its body is the ever-powerful idiosyncratic current that Ronni thrives on. In his prolific and forceful hand all forms take on a different dimension. Even the tiger is twisted to the extreme to look like a cross between an exotic snake and the four-legged mammal, the ominous clouds that hover in the vast sky turn into rain-spewing beasts, the invading Ikhtiar Uddin Mohammad Bokhtiar Khiljee with his 17 armed men are like apparitions -- at once ethereal and beastly. There is even intentional anachronism; from the oil-lamp associated with one of the Arabian Nights' tale there is a rocket shooting through the clouds. Even Spiderman and batman appear in a cameos looking like hybrids.

Other innumerable hybrids aside, the protagonist, Noah, is a large, portentous head painted on an expanding red sail. It spreads over the mid-zone of the canvas providing it a point of focus. Hanging on the top of the lateral sails are three sons of Noah, transformed intomere logos. "They mimic the cubist way of deconstructing a face following a certain spatial order," says their creator. With the rest, the policy is plain and simple: faith in fluidity, or in stretching the forms to extreme to facilitate hybridisation.

Rony's art has an inner-dynamics that brings two seemingly conflicting ideas under one umbrella. The primordial in man meets the post-verbal-era considerations in his art. Then again, one must wake up to the fact that it is after we learnt language that humans were able to grapple with as well as properly define things that are irrational and absurd, -- emotions that go back to the non-verbal-era reality. Ronni brings on the magic of both the worlds, -- the visual strength of the world before language and the ever-increasing possibility of expansion of that world in the presence of language.

The art world of Bangladesh is stilted on the notion that text, or to put it plainly language, has no role to play in art. Ronni has proved that this notion is passé. By resorting to a Biblical theme and by introducing the folklore of different origins to help build his grand vision he has created a horizon full of possibilities. With Ronni the references are just plain cues to enter a fantastic domain.

No matter how the viewers want their references, Ronni will never serve them unscrambled. Though with "The Archeology of Noah's Ark", he could've been more politically motivated as he usually is. But this time around, he opted for the power of image rather than critical reflection on futility of knowledge and civilization, which has been the focus in his last show titled "Mythoronnia".

From the order of things expressed in the recent opus (where the Ark is like an object of contemplation) as well as from their constitutions, it becomes obvious that Ronni lays his hope in the world of subtexts, which is the domain of the mystics and visionaries. Through the plethora of images that crowds the huge boat and the couple of chunks representing the shores (one of which represent the Biblical mountain, Ararat) the desire to transcend reality is discernable. He says, "The boat and Noah have relevance in the present context. As we live in a turbulent time, perhaps a figure like Noah would ignite the hope for our salvation, or perhaps it is Noah's boat that is carrying everything from chaos to what we consider the source of goodness." If the second proposition of the artist is considered, then there is a greater need for a father figure, one who is lead us to deliverance. 

The work took one month to finish. "It dawned on me that there is this tradition of art in Bangladesh that negates story telling. I spent almost six months thinking about the possibility to base my work on a well-known myth, I found that Noah's Ark provides me with the chance to incorporate lots of other myths, fables and axioms which would make the idea more capacious," Ronni relates. He deliberately chose the mode of the travelling salesmen who used to carry hand-drawn pictures to advertise their wares. Though the draughtsmanship that Ronni applies tries to emulate low-art sensibility, in the end, his proposition is a poetic adventure into the domain of popular myths and folklore.