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Colours of poetry

Chandana Hore's works are poetic and are contemplative explorations

HUGE CANVAS Chandana's works absorb all the little things that lie scattered

I play softly on the charcoal/ memory floods in/ I am in colours.

Chandana Hore's recent works have a poetic quality. Marked by thick paint, bright colours and lonely figures, they do not present themselves as chic pictures but more as contemplative explorations. "One sees in these paintings the immense difficulty of the struggle, the slow journey, which brought her art to this point," writes critic Aveek Sen. "This work comes as the end of a phase, which one senses — and the painter agrees — will never return." Chandana's handwritten fragments in the exhibition catalogue provide some clues to her thoughts: "Then the petals open. They are the image of joy and pain. Life and death. Blue and red. Drop by drop. I loved the sea."

The 42-year-old artist, who holds a master's degree in Fine Arts from Visva Bharati, sights her figures on fairly large-sized canvases. Their bodies are large, fleshy and gawky — an obvious consequence of an internal tussle. Their manners and postures — whether sitting, squatting or sleeping — are a picture of nakedness, silence and mute acceptance. The expressions on the faces are unclear, deliberately obscured by the thick paint and colours. Still, these shrouded images manage to reveal as much as they hide.

The locations of the paintings are also undisclosed, although pavements, market place, rocks, hills, streams and the sky can be vaguely identified. Chandana's positioning of flowers, teacups, birds and so on are equally intriguing. Sen says: "These paintings absorb all the little things that lie scattered everywhere and make them part of their internal universe, their single-minded colour-world. Although fully exposed to view, each is a sealed room, a closed theatre that is oblivious to the fact of being looked at."

Chandana's paintings have been brought to the city by Gallery Sumukha and The Seagull Foundation for the Arts. The exhibition concludes on July 19 at Gallery Sumukha, Wilson Garden. Phone: 22292230/ 41207215.

Chandana's jottings

"The flower has its veins; the body survives, despite being burnt, beaten, thrown away; the body creates flowers; velvety, soft, dark flowers; a woman's resting place; her dreams."

"Night engulfs me; night Prussian blue; the body which was a flower is now an ageing leaf; it has lived a long and kissless life."

ATHREYA

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