Asim Paul and Surabhi Chowdhary approach image-making through processes of quiet
construction. Working with different mediums, both artists build their surfaces through gradual,deliberate gestures that prioritize texture, touch, and time. In doing so, they invite a slow looking—one that registers time as much as form.
In Asim Paul’s drawings, dense, layered marks accumulate across the surface. At first glance, these textures may appear mechanical, but closer observation reveals subtle shifts in direction, tone, and density. The image unfolds gradually through these micro-adjustments, where light and form emerge as conditions of texture itself. Paul often gestures toward landscape—flattened cityscapes, eroded terrains, or barren tracts—but these references remain unresolved. Instead, the surface becomes a field of absorption, where figure and ground blur into each other.
Surabhi Chowdhary’s works are shaped by her encounters with light and nature—veins of
leaves, nets filtering daylight, or fireflies flickering in the night sky. Using glue and putty to build subtle reliefs, she extends the painted surface into shallow dimensionality. In her larger canvases, a field of darkness becomes a site for faint illumination, while in others, pigment disperses across surfaces that appear at once solid and porous. Abstraction, for Chowdhary, is not a departure from observation, but a means of registering fleeting, intimate impressions.
Despite clear differences in medium and subject, both artists are invested in surface as a site of quiet transformation. Their mark-making is rhythmic, persistent, and meditative—emphasizing labour not as spectacle but as a condition of being-with the material. Forms appear to dissolve and reassemble under the viewer’s gaze, as light seems to hover or pulse within the image. While Paul’s monochrome works rely on density and abrasion, Chowdhary’s images move between opacity and softness.
Together, these works resist pictorial certainty. They stay suspended between image and abstraction, perception and memory, surface and light. It is within these thresholds that their practices converge—not through shared imagery, but through a mutual attentiveness to transition, stillness, and the poetics of visual experience.
