Darkness Can’t Dive Out Darkness – II (2023)
Drop Your Weapons Here – I (2024)
A closer look at the paintings depicts the artist’s time spent in the ICU, where he experienced contradictory thoughts about fear and yearning, memory and oblivion, chaos and clarity. A three-panel painting titled ‘Darkness Cannot Drive Out Darkness’ was conceived as a dream sequence, Chowdhury tells me, yet it contains within it the trace of his travels to Kalimpong, where he observed the plantation workers and the labour that went into maintaining the beautiful tea gardens. Other panels feature inspired recreations of a Rothko painting he loves and a scene from an Andrei Tarkovsky film that moved him. There is the trace of a beating heart even in the most abstract panels spotlighting comic figures and animals trying to communicate through a string of equations, poems, slogans, made-up words or symbols from the mythical El Dorado and Mesopotamian, Harappan, Roman and Persian imagery. History plays a major role in Chowdhury’s work, as much in its remembrance of the past as in his hope for the future. At the centre of these works is a fictional protagonist, Martha Bose, who brings all these elements together, conceptualised by the artist to defy the constraints of race, religion, gender and language. She takes us on a journey through different civilisations while narrating to us the story of our own.
