PANKAJ CHOUHAN

Born in 1989 (Bihar), Pankaj completed his bachelors, followed by a Masters from Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi. A nostalgic longing, a bittersweet grief for a place which has been lost to us! Pankaj introduces us to a mystical landscape of hazy colours and hypnotic brushstrokes that affirm Chouhan’s belief in the continually transforming aura of the natural world. His paintings; dissipating canvases of disastrous urbanisation and greenlands lost inform us of an abstract vocabulary that is innocent and childlike, yet wilfully committed to narrating the exacting toll of our footprint on the environment.

In this tale, Chouhan’s landscape does not merely hinge on the depiction of a tree, sky, or ground; no, their presence is incidental.

As a colourist, he focuses our attention on the elements that form the landscape: his palette. By emptying commonplace colour associations, his earthy shades of browns and greens exude richness as well as quietude. What makes this remarkable is that such silence is constantly punctured by everyday environmental collapse; it is a violent whirlpool of watercolours helplessly hurtling towards cataclysm. His works are reservoirs of nature's untamed energy,an energy that with each stroke of Chouhan’s brush, gracefully dissipates into the air. In the interplay of light and pigment lies the lived experience of an artist grappling with bechaini, a restless unease born from the relentless impact of ecological catastrophes and environmental degradation.

His work becomes both a creation and a deconstruction of geography- a rendering of cities, towns, nature, and wildlife in their fragile interplay. This dual act of making and unmaking is both a masterful homage to artistic heritage and a deeply personal form of resistance.