Buddhadev Mukherjee’s works on paper present explorations of interiority and reflexivity through the varied mediums of oil and watercolor. Through a deft use of color that extends the self beyond bodily contours and erases the boundaries that divide the mind and its environment, the works enquire into the complex, inward experiences of people engaged in the rhythm of daily time. The series is a study of the human “sensibility” as a realm of feeling and thought, affect and analysis, immersion and distance. Many works feature a singular figure and its extensions—diminutive and separate, yet inextricably connected to the larger figure; Mukherjee evokes the soft cadences of joy and sorrow, loss of self and the precarity of solitude through infusions of small elements. As the weight of the line varies from the works in oil to the watercolors, the shift in artistic treatment also permits Mukherjee to simultaneously explore the dense embodiment and ethereality of being, the humour and pathos of life as two sides of the same coin.
In Mukherjee’s paintings how we navigate life, our private and public spaces, are never a fixed reality—there are surprises and spontaneity, unlikely humor and joy—the self is constantly created, renewed through the rituals of daily life, questioned and altered through countless experiences and understandings. The force of humor—what Simon Critchley describes as “tension between expectation and actuality”, resides in its ability to lead us up to the point of aspiration, only to present us with the real, the undeniable, the inevitable. This strange movement of humour, where a chuckle is a sign of acquiescence, acceptance or greater self-awareness is writ large onto these canvases.
It’s difficult to describe the feelings encompassed in these works, perhaps because they capture what is most difficult, most intimate—everyday pains of loving and losing—oneself and another. The questions we ask ourselves change with the passage of time, even if answers to many are neither found nor sought. Similarly, these works defy a surface description as they carry folds of poetic imprints.
It’s difficult to describe the feelings encompassed in these works, perhaps because they capture what is most difficult, most intimate—everyday pains of loving and losing—oneself and another. The questions we ask ourselves change with the passage of time, even if answers to many are neither found nor sought. Similarly, these works defy a surface description as they carry folds of poetic imprints.
To bind Mukherjee’s approach to documenting this fullness of being—the floods and droughts of feeling—as literary or theatrical is to perhaps overlook the qualities imbued to expression by painting as a medium, even though it is tempting to read a poetic impulse in the clean restraint of each work, the arrangement of bodily parts and negative space in harmonious relation. In exploring the visuality of feeling through the force of stroke and colour,Mukherjee presents scenes that can be inhabited by viewers, who may relate to the sanguine ineffability of each work , the open pursuit of meaning and joy, the rich inner life of the human mind that persists in its own journey and carves its own time, even as history, in chords both minor and major, produces raucous symphonies.