New Delhi, March 12 Art Alive Gallery will present artist Chandra Bhattacharjee's recent series of works titled 'Night Forest' from March 16 to April 15.
Following the contours and characteristics of current ecological crisis for last three years, the artist, in the current collection, gazes around him a painter who took photography as his tool to observe the environment.
Chandra's oeuvre is a dense amalgamation of fine strokes and intense gaze in to the forest landscapes only to return back with elements of human interventions that either erase it or shocks the viewer with bright yet subtle forms appearing and disappearing on the surface.
The minimalistic treatment of his subject, with a keen eye on the surrounding that remains empty opens with a burst of fire in the dark of the jungle.
Chandra Bhattacharjee's recent paintings take the form of mysterious nocturnes - evocations of the forest at night, a forest in retreat at the edge where urban life meets and exerts its expansionist pressure on the natural world. In these paintings - most of them rendered in a rich spectrum of greys calibrated between pearl white and charcoal black, with occasional undertones of lignite, sepia and indigo - we come upon vegetation that has been rendered translucent, a deer whose eyes gleam in the glare of intrusive headlights, and strange neon batons and reflections of metropolitan lighting that float in and out of glades and thickets that, we fear, will soon pass from the wilderness to the realm of construction.
In short, these works bring us face to face with the wasteland of a future that we have engineered for ourselves.
Complementing his work as a painter within the walls of his studio is his ongoing, out-of-studio photographic practice. He finds himself trying to capture, or condense, in his frames, the vastness of the land. His photographs are large-scale, mostly long shots. He is inevitably drawn to nature's smallest elements and consequently into the details.
( With inputs from IANS )