CHANDRA BHATTACHARJEE
ARTIST

At first, it seemed like an instinctive decision to magnify my characters to larger-than-life physical stature, which is a stark contrast with their wilfully invisibilised existence. However, the more I got into the physicality of charcoal sticks confronting vast white paper space, the deeper I dug myself into a kind of a personal trench.
I realised that it was not that instinctive a decision after all. The luxury of playing with space was actually a reliving of parts of myself. The monochrome people that I have drawn, often with their backs turned to the audience, and their dusty ‘riches,’ are parts of myself that I can now own.
As a hoarding painter in Calcutta of the eighties, balanced on bamboo scaffoldings, I had a bird’s eye view of humanity, too often defined by economic poverty and its accompanist, squalor. While the usual busy-city cacophony was muffled by the vertical hiatus, I would often be jolted out of my vacuum by an unmistakeable stench, or an amplified crunch that no distance could dilute. Peering from my perch, I would see that it was life as usual. Amorphous. Unnoticed. Apparently, nothing was out of order.
This ‘life as usual’ unsettled me. Rather, it settled down on me as later, I could afford life and time on firmer ground. These memories have coalesced with my continued observations even as the optical perspectives changed, filtering into my figures, forms, animals, plants, landscapes.
This set of drawings is a continuation of my shots in the dark, my visual suggestions that may strike a chord. A lot like the chancy existences of those humans, who in my eyes, rise high from crowds.

- Chandra Bhattacharjee