'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.

SOUMIK NANDY MAJUMDAR & JESAL THACKER

JIBANANANDA DAS : SENSATION

Into the half light and shadow go I. Within my head
Not a dream, but some sensation works its will.
Not a dream, not peace, not love,
A sensation born in my very being.
I cannot escape it
For it puts its hand in mine,
And all else pales to insignificance – futile, so it
Seems,
All thought – all times of prayer,
Seem empty,
Empty, so it seems.

 -Translated by Clinton B. Seely

- JESAL THACKER