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The exuberance of detail in Jogen Chowdhury's powerful linear compositions is balanced by his ‘resounding minimalist vision' – that sure artistic instinct that decides that even a line more would blur the nuances of meaning and perception.
The wide-ranging spectrum of satirical nuances that defines Jogen Chowdhury's artistic vision, materially transforms his created forms, and confers on them the surrealism of fantasy. R. Siva Kumar of Kala Bhavan in Santiniketan, examines his artistic progression through the years, “Like Ganesh Pyne, he started working in the Bengal School tradition as a student but in his later works, the sinuous figures of his predecessors were turned into an amorphous maze of nervous meanderings, and their romantic idealizations were displaced by an eerie surrealistic clairvoyance … engagement with the surreal later mutated into social criticism … his malformed palimpsest of meshed lines acquires a more satirical edge … thus after initial escape from reality into fantasy … (the artist) … through a surrealist interlude, returns to the plane of social reality…”
Analyzing his compositional style, art critic Sovon Som writes, “The linear exuberance of folk art that evokes a sense of drama and sensuality, came to his art as a releasing force … He reduced his palette to two neutrals, black and white, to emphasize their binary opposition, as well as to allegorize human relationship. To the sinuous fluidity of the linear arabesque, he added a fine tracing of cross hatching to conceive his images. His heavily articulated figures, lumpy, distorted and often erotic, betray an inner anguish. Their irregular contours are almost on the verge of physical dissolution …”
Every medium unfolds its own distinctive ‘manner' of expression, and Jogen Chowdhury sums up his preferred artistic mode thus, “Since my college days, I was…fond of drawings … In fact I have cultivated my personal form/language of artwork or painting in mixed media based on drawing … as a unique form of art expression.”
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