Often there’s no firm figure, nor a clear ground. Neither a border, nor a frame, suggesting a notional transcendence of the surface. And the surface, the paper Goutam Chowdhury himself makes, is so feverishly wracked with stone and iron dust, earth colours and pastel that it turns into a craggy palimpsest with furtive layers and residual scabs, sometimes recalling fading murals, mossed over, peeling off at places, shedding bits of imagery, leaving faint, teasing clues.
At other times, the meld of tones and textures reinforces the illusion of a grainy vapour. As though you’ve stepped into an atmosphere where smoke from smouldering fires billows, in dark, thickened wads or in amorphous, yellow-red gases in which charred particles are suspended.
Wrapped in the miasma are excerpts of garbled figures on the point of being Eclipsed by its intractable flux. The title of Chowdhury’s recent solo show at Charubasona gallery seems to hint that these mangled, shredded creatures are evaporating into a purgatory for the damned. A bald head and one dazed eye hovering above two stumpy, leprous hands (picture), recalls The Last Judgment. But wait. This is no sinner who’s brought retribution on himself; he’s Anonymous Anyone, shrinking from unknown, inimical forces that constitute life itself: one of Chowdhury’s rudderless beings trying, perhaps, to negotiate inexplicable buffetings, trying to remain anchored to their bodies as these disintegrate, groping for the self the body lends a material identity to. A scaly torso is imprisoned here, a misbegotten skull floats up there, but the sculpturesque contours are evanescent, dissolving in the vapour, all social markers erased in this forbidding limbo.
If Chowdhury profiles life as a treacherous miasma, Sonal Ambani asks people to “embrace the now”. An intense engagement with the moment, but without attachment, brings a Buddhist dimension to the title of her recent show at Kolkata Centre for Creativity: Transcendental Time. However, an ironic contradiction is built into her hefty metal sculptures: the globe, the elephant, the (sharemarket) bull, filigreed with corporate logos and currency symbols. This critiques not just global capitalism that makes the world go round but all forms of crass temporality as well.
