Shots In The Dark: Shridharani Gallery

At first, it seemed like an instinctive decision to magnify my characters
to larger-than-life physical stature, which is a stark contrast with their
wilfully invisibilised existence. However, the more I got into the physicality
of charcoal sticks confronting vast white paper space, the deeper I dug
myself into a kind of a personal trench.
I realised that it was not that instinctive a decision after all. The luxury
of playing with space was actually a reliving of parts of myself. The
monochrome people that I have drawn, often with their backs turned to
the audience, and their dusty ‘riches,’ are parts of myself that I can now
own.
As a hoarding painter in Calcutta of the eighties, balanced on bamboo
scaffoldings, I had a bird’s eye view of humanity, too often defined by
economic poverty and its accompanist, squalor. While the usual busy-city
cacophony was muffled by the vertical hiatus, I would often be jolted out
of my vacuum by an unmistakeable stench, or an amplified crunch that no
distance could dilute. Peering from my perch, I would see that it was life
as usual. Amorphous. Unnoticed. Apparently, nothing was out of order.
This ‘life as usual’ unsettled me. Rather, it settled down on me as later,
I could afford life and time on firmer ground. These memories have
coalesced with my continued observations even as the optical perspectives
changed, filtering into my figures, forms, animals, plants, landscapes.
This set of drawings is a continuation of my shots in the dark, my visual
suggestions that may strike a chord. A lot like the chancy existences of
those humans, who in my eyes, rise high from crowds.
– Chandra Bhattacharjee