Monumental Figures Within Intimate Frames
To look at artist Jogen Chowdhury's human figures created as drawings on sheets of paper is to be invited into the realm of a storyteller. This small solo of 15 works at Sanchit Art's Booth E7 as part of India Art Fair 2018 extols the virtues of ‘small is beautiful'. These individuals with fleshy torsos — mostly topless, dhoti clad, at most times elderly, with thin, curled fingers and long arms, inform the social milieu of Chowdhury's world and appear animated with character on paper.
Chowdhury has explored the realms of drawings for more five decades. Whether he creates a long-haired, doe-eyed woman with a heavy necklace and pencil thin lips or a man lounging on a charpoy, Jogen's works on paper have a rare monumental quality. Jogen Chowdhury is known for fine detailing—the cross hatched textures celebrate the human skin as much as the hidden suggestions of deeply grooved faces that exude sensuality.
Not Just a Pretty Picture
“A drawing is about being able to cultivate the body and spirit [...] it is not only about a pretty picture. Working with the basic nature of a person is very much a characteristic of my work; I draw upon natural elements of people's faces for inspiration,” explained Jogen to this writer in 2007 at his studio in Shantiniketan, his bountiful sketches scattered around him.
Folk Elements & Animated Characters
Over the years, whether Jogen creates a profile of a girl or a man stretching in his sleep it is his ability to distort form in order to create fluid lines on the human body that keeps his figures alive and animated. The decorative style inherent in his work is an ode to folk elements. Of great intensity is an Untitled work in which a bare bosomed woman holds a skull in her hand. The intricate crosshatching texture exudes a three-dimensional attractiveness. The textures on the skull, the threaded texture of the thin cotton vastra and the strands of hair all emanate an organic aura. The figure is alive and jumping off the page.
You can celebrate his observation and understanding of the perspectives of the human form in the way he draws luxuriant limbs and celebrates the sheets of paper, pastels and the art of drawing. He plays between the sensuousness of languid and graceful tendrils when he creates his women but he does so with a sophisticated air of rustic rhythms. His politicians are surreal, pot-bellied caricatures who seem less human. Scholars have said his expression is deeply rooted in the Indian traditions — whatever be his subject, Jogen Chowdhury's solo proves he is nonpareil.
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