A solo exhibition of Pankaj Chouhan

Mentored by Prima Kurien

Writing for Gulam Mohammed Sheikh’s solo exhibition Returning Home—a retrospective of works from 1968 to 1985 at the Centre Pompidou, Paris—Gieve Patel recorded the artist expressing, ‘It is not that if you see pink, you paint pink. A Mewar painter does not use red because there is red earth around him. It has something to do with a full body experience of the environment.’ This elemental experience of pinks, greens, and blues filling our landscape is as savourable as it is visual for the Indian painter. It is an immersive sensuality that transforms our perception of the natural world; a flood of colours that washes over all that is flesh. In this inundation lies Pankaj Chouhan’s paintbrush, daubing over the changing faces of our cities and farmlands.

Hiraeth 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 where Tyeb Mehta’s Trussed Bull prances around—helplessly hurtling towards cataclysm.

The works on display here are storehouses of violent natural—nature’s—energy; an energy that smoothly dissolves into thin air with each stroke of Chouhan’s brush. One is reminded of J. Swaminathan’s works: straightforward brushstrokes that are immediately grasped in a single viewing, but remain potently lodged in our minds, resonating deeply, and capturing our attention overtime. In this concentration of light and pigment lies the lived experience of an artist that has been fighting ‘bechaini,’ an air of despondency due to unmitigated ecological catastrophe and environmental degradation. Chouhan’s world navigates itself through a historic tradition of art-making that has filled the manuscripts of the Hamzanama as well as the waterfalls of Song dynasty paintings. It is the intuitive making of a geography—a representation of cities and towns, of nature and wildlife—and its very unmaking. This is his masterful borrowing, and his personal resistance.

*Hiraeth, from Welsh, is a nostalgic longing, a bittersweet grief for a place which has been lost to us.

Written by Shankar Tiwari