Tending to Paradise: The Paintings of Srijon Chowdhury
by Paul Maziar
“Art is a form of nourishment (of consciousness, the spirit)” — Susan Sontag
“Every work of art is a child of its time, while often it is the parent of our emotions.” — Wassily Kandinsky
The artist’s job, it often seems, is to reveal the unseen, to shine light upon what’s obscured. What’s been uncovered, from the perspective the viewer, can be taken in as personal, or else universal and sometimes, the artist shows us that what’s personal is universal. This line of work, this challenge, is perfectly germane to the painter Srijon Chowdhury. Surprisingly, his pictures give the sense of rich, deep meaning by way of the simplest of subject matter. For Chowdhury, it’s not just one thing that serves as a motivating force, e.g.: fatherhood, current politics, art history, etc. Chowdhury maintains a balanced attention to his creative motivations, his knowledge, and his affinities. Having been cultivated and internalized, these frames of reference make for an art story that the painter continually tells as he goes about his life. Chowdhury’s chosen subject matter ranges from the personal—scenes, often tender and intimate, of his family—to the universal—flowers and arches. In fact, flowers have lately served as a vehicle for Chowdhury, to bring about variegated meaning to his viewer, depending upon or relative to the viewer’s experience or perception. Two of Chowdhury’s arch-and-flower paintings, Arch (Blue) and Arch (Green) (2015), were recently acquired by the Portland State University Art Collection. These works typify the artist’s interest in story, myth—and the power and mystery that natural forms and environments can evoke.
As Chowdhury related to me on a recent studio visit, he’s keen to the flower’s “symbolism, used throughout history and across cultures. Flowers have so much meaning, but […] it’s interesting; anyone can put meaning into a flower.”1 For Chowdhury, this meaning, the potential of this particular form, has been brought to the most elemental levels, so as to remind one of the redemptive quality of nature in a time of apparent environmental entropy and uncertainty. He reminds us that “being alive is an incredible, amazing thing. I think the flowers kind of show that. They’re just these delicate things that pop up.”2 Looking at both Arch (Blue) and Arch (Green), one thinks of peonies or anemones, but the flowers here, are imagined flowers. This in itself adds allure to what is already a somewhat enigmatic composition, wherein the scene before us floats or lies flat, by turns depicting either ground or sky, or in some cases both. The effect is dizzying, magical.
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It has been widely agreed upon that visual art, music, and poetry can impact our emotions, on our spiritual sense, and our perceptual experience. This is the very reason to make art and to enjoy it as a spectator. In terms of visual art over the course of recorded history, every form at one’s access has served this purpose, from the prehistoric cave drawings to modern architecture. This brings us to Chowdhury’s arches. The arch paintings, as he explains, “came from a desire to mimic the mosque that my great, great, great, grandfather Asgar Chowdhury had built on the coast of Bangladesh.”3
Reaching upward toward and into the heavens—in the case both the mosque’s architectural flourishes, and also the motif across Chowdhury’s oeuvre—the arches figure our position on earth and make an impression on our senses. Serving to elucidate thresholds, arches also demarcate (both literally metaphorically) the inside from the outside, the open and the closed, the public and the private, the secular and the sacred. Chowdhury’s arches envelop the viewer; they're meant to “mimic the way a myth becomes a religion” as Chowdhury told me. The way the architecture and borders “are ornamented, the removing of paint obfuscated, relates to the original idea of [the arch] being a large structure that encompasses you.”4 Once you notice how ever-present arches are throughout art history, and as a common aspect of the ideal pictorial structure in general, you’ll see them seemingly everywhere. From the loggias and porches of the Italian Renaissance to the windows and arched figures throughout modern and contemporary art.
Chowdhury’s work, in the case of both his flowers and the arches, is presented here as a salve to, a momentary reprieve from, the sometimes hellish nature of the world. In this way, it’s spiritual; not at all to say, “religious,” but in the way that symbolist painters, musicians and poets invoke the spiritual. Chowdhury’s paintings bring a sense of individual freedom, however elusive and enigmatic. The richness in his surfaces, coupled with the symbolic depths in these works, gives the character of a dream. The paintings engage, and yet their aspect of calm seizes, the viewer. A walk through Chowdhury’s created landscapes is a timeless walk—a communion with the literal and the imaginary world—in flourishes of oil paint worked and reworked by our painter. In visual art, perception plays with material. Chowdhury works to synthesize experience and render an imaginative new space, keenly allowing something unknown to take shape, to bloom.
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Paul Maziar writes about art and books for various publications such as BOMB, the Brooklyn Rail, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Oregon ArtsWatch, and L.A. Weekly. A book of his art writings, ONE FOOT IN THE OTHER WORLD, is new from AC Books.
Srijon Chowdhury (Dhaka, Bangladesh, 1987) lives and works in Portland, OR. He holds a BFA from the University of Minnesota Twin Cities, Minneapolis and Saint Paul, MN, and an MFA from the Otis College of Art and Design, Los Angeles. Like a vision of art history projected through a prism, Chowdhury’s work refracts received conventions of the “painting” and the “artist,” mixing fiction and autobiography, and past and present.
Two works from 2015, Arch (Blue) and Arch (Green) were recently added to the Portland State University Art Collection and are located in the new Vanport Building.
1. Paul Maziar, Flower Power: A Studio-Visit Conversation between Paul Maziar & Srijon Chowdhury (S.l.: AC BOOKS, 2021), 11.
2. Paul Maziar, Flower Power: A Studio-Visit Conversation between Paul Maziar & Srijon Chowdhury (S.l.: AC BOOKS, 2021), 11.
3. Srijon Chowdhury in correspondence with the author, November 2021.
4. Srijon Chowdhury in correspondence with the author, November 2021.