Jogen Chowdhury is an unusual modern artist of his generation who has preferred to work mostly in pastels, water colour and ink, evading more favoured mediums like oil-painting which he was so good at too. Over the time, with sustained effort, he has developed and honed a visual idiom rooted in Indian soil and shaped by the modernist climate, without taking either a revivalist or a nationalist refuge or deriving out of an obvious model of Western modernism. Unmistakably, he carved out a niche for his own with an inimitable and distinctive style of working, following his instinct, almost as soon as he finished his college.
Jogen's early works done during the college days reveal the presence of a young attentive mind for whom the routine academic lessons were opportune occasions to look closely at objects and spaces with an empathy. Further, these early works clearly anticipate some of the characteristic features profoundly present in his later works. In his eyes figures and objects cease to remain mere objects.They assume a life of their own. In these study-based drawings and water-colours. they tend to relinquish their formal objecthood and unveil a propensity to embody the character of a receptive form, subject to emotional and expressive inflicts. The shadows of gloom and lonesomeness, can also be felt, well-nigh imperceptibly in some of these drawings from life. One can almost feel a strange companionship between the artist and the studied objects; companionship with a distant undertone of a subjective response. Perhaps what was inadvertent in these early works begin to appear as a constant feature in Jogen's later, matured works. Moreover, the space occupied by these objects and figures in the initial works, are often found cast in shadows destined to get darker, in tone and hue.What seems to be an unnamed and unfathomable blackness is evocative of a palpable darkness, reminiscent of the lived experience of the artist who has passed through the darker realms of life and seen human plight closely, almost in tactile terms.
Jogen Chowdhury's personal style can also be understood as a natural consequence of his own affinity with the organic energies of life manifest in nature. The ornamental craving and the sagging people with distinctive facial features share the same space. Female figures with disturbing scars on their bodies often lend themselves to the decorative insinuations of lines. Unambiguous or oblique, references to the lived time and space are left to resonate further. One of those rare artists of his time he also introduces an incisive tone of satire and in his works without any topical allusion.
Jogen's art breathes life in touch with the real. In other words, it celebrates the realm of passion, sensation, and emotion, benign or unkind. Besides, his art, especially his drawings, also claim an independent life of their own, irrespective of what they represent. They can intensely and often instantly draw us in and stimulate us to engage with the varied linear configurations in a way to make us believe that the drawings themselves are the ultimate sources of imagination – almost replacing the real.
A reflective show like this covering the large time spectrum over sixty years from the early days till now certainly unfolds not only the trials and achievements but also the decisive moments and turning points in the career of one of the most celebrated and prolific artists of our times. This show celebrates this long and rich journey that commenced from late 50s when Jogen Chowdhury was a young tenderfoot in the world of art, with eyes full of dreams and fortitudes. For him it is an occasion to rewind back, to replay the time, as it were, and to relive those moments which shaped him as an artist and inspired him to work with an exceptional passion and vision.
