I.

 

CHANDRA Bhattacharjee’s recent paintings take the form of mysterious nocturnes: evocations of the forest at night, a forest in retreat at the edge where urban life meets and exerts its expansionist pressure on thåe natural world. In these paintings – most of them rendered in a rich spectrum of greys calibrated between pearl white and charcoal black, with occasional undertones of lignite, sepia, vermilion and indigo – we come upon vegetation that has been rendered translucent, and deer whose eyes gleam in the glare of intrusive headlights. And we encounter strange neon batons: inexplicable at first, these turn out to be reflections of metropolitan lighting floating in and out of glades and thickets that, we fear, will soon be trampled under

the march of suburbs under construction.

This suite of paintings has been developed, as is customary with Bhattacharjee, through a demanding and time-intensive process that involves the creation of a conté base on the canvas, the laying on of luminous acrylic in matte layers, and the detailing of a surface of delicate, meticulous brushwork hatched to resemble craquelure. Strikingly, the point of vantage from which these paintings are presented is an intimate one, so that small-scale events assume an epic scale. Take, for instance, a triptych in which a dead flower, in diaphanous white, occupies our field of vision.

Beyond it, we see a group of people dancing, shadows shivering at nightfall. Are they lost, beyond trail and signpost? Are they predators hunting down hapless prey? Or are they spirits kindred to the bohemian nomads in Sunil Gangopadhyay’s Aranyer Dinratri (Days and Nights in the Forest, 1968) – revellers attempting to connect with lost intuitions and sensations in a wilderness beyond the numbing routines and self-alienating conventions of city life? Both the novel and the painting suggest that such an escape usually translates as an exploitative imposition of urban  fantasy on a rural or natural reality. When Bhattacharjee shifts his focal length, he bears witness to humankind’s bafflement in the context of an ecology that it has devastated through its wilfulness, its obsession with the primacy of its own insatiable appetites, its brusque abrogation of the claims of other species. The artist has long been preoccupied with relationships among species – chiefly the unequal relationship between humankind, which regards nature instrumentally as ‘natural resources’, and the forms of flora and fauna that have the misfortune of getting in its way. This preoccupation gains saliency at a time of ecological degradation and imminent environmental collapse.

Born at the beginning of the 1960s – a decade of political turbulence and social upheaval in his native West Bengal – Bhattacharjee belongs to a family rooted in the Burdwan region. His childhood memories pivot around the village of Patuli. Once the centre of an ancient kingdom, Patuli’s fortunes have been defined throughout the 20th century by the changing of the courses of the Bhagirathi, Ajay, and Damodar rivers, under pressure from dams and embankments. Over the last few decades, the artist has watched as once-flourishing mango orchards have vanished, and once-fertile paddy fields have disappeared into the sand left behind by departing waters. Mining, too, has played a role in this process of despoliation, as the industrial hunger for minerals has led to the clearing of many acres of thick sal and palash forests in this zone.

 

II.

 

BHATTACHARJEE'S magisterial body of recent work resonates with the thrum of scorched forests. In several of these paintings, smoke rises from the earth’s smouldering embers, from dumping grounds and devastated plains. These works are animated by the interplay of shadow and spangle, dark waters and the streaking trajectories of meteorites. In a series of small watercolours that suggest the spectral, flickering quality of film negatives, the artist dwells on a solitary figure dragging a rope or hose through emptiness; an old man guided by a blind crane; a donkey and a bush isolated from all guarantees of habitation; a forest bursting into flame. As viewers, we find ourselves transformed into pilgrims traversing an Inferno.

Many of Bhattacharjee’s paintings prompt two simultaneous, and opposite, responses. On the one hand, we are drawn inexorably into the enigma of the image. On the other, we feel distanced from the action, as though it were an allegory unfolding, in cinematic terms, in mid-shot. We feel, at the same time, immersed in these paintings but also at a remove from them. This paradox of visuality records the dialogue between painting and photography in Bhattacharjee’s oeuvre. He is a practitioner of night photography, especially in nature reserves, and of a daytime photographic portraiture of pastoral, agrarian, and forested expanses. His camera bears witness to the vulnerability of the open earth, and to the invasiveness of the most invasive species of all – the optimistically named homo sapiens. The photographer’s vision, compassionate yet distant, informs his practice of painting. And yet, there is no simple equivalence between photographic record and pictorial rendition in Bhattacharjee’s works. Take, for instance, the flowers in his paintings: they remind us, often, of the stylised flowers in Mughal marble intarsia work. They are not rendered with an eye to photographic verisimilitude. Nor are the birds in his paintings. They are not simple, generic representatives of various avian species; each bird has a personality, and is wise, curious, or pensive. They could well been among the feathered seekers who accompanied the hoopoe on that grand quest for enlightenment elaborated in the 12 th -century Persian masterpiece of Sufi wisdom, Mantiq at-Tair (‘The Parliament of Birds’). In a large-scale charcoal drawing on paper – a drawing-installation that is inserted into a room – Bhattacharjee invokes our self-crafted predicament in the most archetypal yet urgently topical manner. A man in contemporary clothes has fallen on his knees, his hands held out, before a burning bush that bends in a wind, its sparks arcing above him like fireflies even while he remains mantled by darkness. Is he a prophet receiving illumination, or a survivor confronting catastrophe? In the extraordinarily moving works gathered to form Night Forest, Bhattacharjee brings us face to face with the wasteland of a future that we have engineered for ourselves.

Yet the eye follows and fastens on the light in the enveloping darkness of these works. However velvety or charred, this darkness is punctuated, challenged, and held in counterpoint by brightness in various forms and intensities. Each such confrontation becomes an ephemeral yet memorable event, a recurrent seed moment in Bhattacharjee’s repertoire: a sky pricked with stars; shooting stars leaving scintillations like afterimages among clouds; the mantle of afterglow from a sunset on a distant hill; the caul of shadow around a figure picked out by firelight. These are the finite traces that mark the passage of deeper, more elusive infinities. In returning to them repeatedly, the artist renews his imaginative engagement with a world lurching between genteel instability and runaway chaos. In the realm of all that is precarious and penumbral, the brief luminescence – gleam, spark, glow, and afterglow – becomes a vital element in Bhattacharjee’s poetics. In terms of technique, he produces it through the disclosure of negative space, by wiping away an overlayer of pigment or rubbing away a drift of charcoal, to reveal the underlying white of canvas or paper. Might this not be a residual metaphor for resurgent hope, in a present that

offers us little consolation or cause for celebration?

 

Ranjit Hoskote

(Kolkata: 11 February 2020 – Bombay: 8 March 2020)