Jogen Chowdhury's art, for all its stylistic and thematic diversities, adheres to a consuming passion distinguished by the sensory attributes central to most of his works. His art, in retrospect, reveal a certain attentiveness, especially to human condition and its organic affinity to nature, analogous to the evocatively pensive poems of Jibanananda Das, one of the favorite poets of the artist. Jibanananda's verses too suggest an obsessive concern with human existence and its inescapable predicament amidst the presence of the natural flow of life. At the heart of their works resides a psychologically nuanced poetic exploration of consciousness, effectively collapsing the linguistic distinctions between the formal and the informal, between the impersonal and the personal, between the conventional and the avant-garde. Born forty years apart, both Jibanananda Das and Jogen Chowdhury unfold in their works an intensified search for a contemporary language, poetic and visual respectively, evoking a sense of decay and degeneration, paradoxically within a lyrical and often enchanting world. Located within the present curatorial concept Jibanananda Das appears as a possible means of an entry into the various sub-domains of Jogen Chowdhury's visual world embodying the fortitude of life despite agony and despair.
'Into The Half Light And Shadow Go I', is the opening line from Jibanananda's poem Bodh (Sensation) that functions as a gateway to the curatorial framework that anchors the art of Jogen Chowdhury to the modern tradition of the informed, self-reflexive artistic responses to human condition articulated similarly by the poet whose verses have profoundly shaped the sensibilities of the artist since formative years. The curatorial idea attempts at tracing the artist's persistent willingness to encounter the possible signs of human anguish evident from his early works, including the academic exercises which anticipate his human concerns vis-à-vis social reality manifest in later works. Jogen Chowdhury reiterates this concern in distinctive visual idioms inquiring the notion of representation and personification comparable to Jibanananda's poetic reality, rooted in the soil, albeit a lost one.
As a poet and an artist respectively, both Jibanananda and Jogen evoke quintessentially Bengali ethos yet the referential world evident in the conceptual underpinning of their works is truly transcultural, beyond the borders, embracing a world view. Like Jibanananda Das's imageries in his poems, Jogen's flaccid forms too emerge from the soil, specifically the soil of Bengal. Jogen has returned frequently to the symbols of everyday life endued with a suggestive, bristling sensuality. This sensuality in Jogen's art is quite special and unique as it is integrally tied up with the mundane and often with an inevitable lassitude. Bordering on eroticism, this sensuality is anything but demonstrative. It is, as K. G. Subramanyan says, 'more disarming than provocative.'
Many of Jogen Chowdhury's works, by virtue of their sheer gripping intensity amongst other things, impose a kind of silence. By inflicting silence, these works make us listen; listen to another kind of silence sowed in the painting. The aging figures swell, moist vegetables rot, succulent fruits smell, middle-class couples sweat, primeval creepers grow, robust tigers leap, libido-snakes creep, slumped pillows bloat, blood-stained dagger piercing through a body – life carries on, but all in silence. The renewed emphasis on these aspects offers a wider art historical background, positing Jogen Chowdhury in the context of twentieth Indian modernism which preferred enigmatic images to narrative depictions, attributing his art with a sense of inscrutable loss and longing that clings to twentieth century art and thought.
