CHANDRA BHATTACHARJEE
ARTIST

Dissolving the Surface

Sometimes, far from the colours it is the monochromes and the negative plates that delve into the soul and tell a story — a story of a deeper consciousness moving slowly in the objects and the world around, observing, cogitating and creating. The power of black and white transparencies is tremendous. They tell the story of the inside, an insight that is hidden and which the artist’s consciousness has tapped and brought to the surface of the sheet, like myriad little veins that lie undiscovered, and a sudden flash of light magically reveals the inner patterns that go back to the primal truth of our lives, that envision the very roots of our civilization and the world in which we live today. And in that moment the viewer realizes that they are witnessing a complex interplay of the subject and the object, of the artist and his canvas. So complex and profound is this, that the subjectivity of the artist seems to have somehow crossed the boundaries of being and brushed itself in the myriad ways of light and a thousand shades of black onto the paper.
Chandra Bhattacharjee’s series, Dissolving the Surface, is an elucidation of this rare phenomenon. Through his treatment of light and spectra of blacks, Chandra Bhattacharjee seems to have crossed the boundaries of his medium.
“I work on flat surfaces. Unlike a sculptor or an installation artist, whose raw material may already have dimension, my experiment is to heighten and expand the scope of canvas on paper. But not literally so — as obviously, I’m not interested in creating three-dimensional images. With my paintings I re-see the most regular sights, incidents and characters that we come across directly or indirectly almost every day,” says Chandra.
His style moves beyond ‘academic watercolours’ that are associated with Bengal. The astounding and yet nuanced chemistry of dark and light that Chandra has achieved in this suite of small watercolour works on paper is something that he has been developing over the years. He breathes life into his paintings as much with his assiduous brush strokes as with his ability to leave spaces of native paper. This manifestation of light and dark lends itself to the eternal paradox of darkness and light, encompassing the everlasting riddles of human civilisation.
Issues of ecology and preservation of our home, the Earth, concerns with the destruction of the natural vegetation and loss of entire species have always been with Chandra, the man, the photographer, the artist, and the thinker. These concerns are what he carries with him in his creative and artistic journeys. But alongside these anxieties are the hidden, subconscious rhythms, the slow penetration of paper by the artist’s mind and his quiet fervour —so much so that the surface of both the canvas and the individual consciousness stand unveiled for the evanescent moment when the viewer’s eye goes deep into the artwork. This is accompanied by the discovery that not all is a simple dualism, not all is surface and depth. Sometimes, depth van be revealed in the surface. It is this perception that marks the series, Dissolving the Surface.
“I’m a version of a slow thinker, not given to spot responses and instant attitudes. That runs opposite to my nature. I allow the so-called little things to seep in, accumulate, construct their own spaces and echoes. My work offers me an opportunity to make sense of these inputs. The thin line between the paper’s surface and my reflection dissolves in the process,” he says.
The manmade forest fire depicted so often in his paintings, destroys all, but its destructive glow is eerily beautiful, drawing the viewer into questioning the deceptive serenity of the aftermath. In one work, a tree is shown as spangled with small globules of light that lie shimmering as lit fruits on branches. The viewer looks at the beauty of this tree in the forest. The light, which may be emanating from a catastrophic forest fire is a lambent, throbbing glow here. The trees, so delicately done, can be the most evocative poem to the resplendence of nature, yet they also carry a haunting threnodic quality.
Another painting — of a bird, soft and bathed in luminosity, and the sliver of light both threatening as well as a radiant feather — is once again a beautiful testament to the space that Chandra persistently opens up, the in-between space which questions a simple black and white, and takes one to the very edge of consciousness, the brink of the surface and beyond.
Chandra’s paintings partake of many photographic effects like chiaroscuro and spotlight, brilliantly combining his interest in black and white films with boyhood memories, both fluid and photographic, of unrestrained nature in his village. The empty spotlight is another visual symbol or perhaps a metaphor that Chandra uses in many of his works. These elements of light mark a unique characteristic of his artistic practice where he simply leaves blank spaces on his canvas/paper thereby avoiding the opacity of the white pigment.
In this series, light itself becomes a complex symbol. At moments it points to the absent figure, at times to destruction as a fire and at moments just a sheer whimsical and arbitrary play of light. Both of which are an intrinsic part of life. Layers of colour and effects of grey tone wash bestow a porosity, a tactility, and the fine mesh-like effects rendered with brushstrokes hearken to a window, perhaps a glance, into deeper worlds, as if this porosity is a surface itself that is dissolving towards an elusive revelation.
The key elements of the beginning of civilisation and the rout of the forests through the very element i.e. fire, that initiated human dwelling and civilisation, is Chandra’s account and critique of where we find ourselves today. Chandra explores the light and dark effects with the flair of a skilled artist and the depth of a sensitive philosopher. Perhaps that is the reason there is a state of paradoxicality and an innate complexity in his work. The light, for example, is both the light of the forest fires and at the same time the light of illumination.
The presence of rocks and boulders as possible obstructions, but also strong signifiers of the earth and witness to the march of civilisation, the beasts of burden, all take the viewer back to the very beginning and facilitate a similar route to the passage beyond accoutrements of modern consciousness. Chandra goes back to the roots of our civilization and paints objects like the humans, animals, trees, huts. All these take the viewer away from the modern urbanity to another mode of existence.
At another level, Chandra’s work strikes a chord with the rhythms and landscapes of his childhood. Chandra’s work strikes a chord with the powerful rhythms and landscapes of his childhood. His subjects may also be traced to the open fields when he ran barefoot with his friends, flying kites in wild abandon, and coming back home to a quieter life indoors, where he watched in fascination as his aged aunt embroidered atypical forms and landscapes in their dimly-lit adobe hut.
These impressions cogitate, gestate in the mind of the artist and then there is an effulgence, an eruption of these and a myriad other impressions stored in the heart and the mind which come out as an emanation of creative outpourings so intense that they seem to dissolve and in a moment of artistic genius connects the materiality of paper and the immateriality of spirit.
Chandra Bhattacharjee is one of the very few artists who taps on the innermost sources of creativity and move in a trajectory that is uniquely and singularly his own. It is not determined by the conventional, or the worldly, but instead he as an artist, charts his own destiny with a confidence, and with a subtlety and innocence, that can only be the mark of a true artist.

Jyoti Kathpalia