Articles on Indian contemporary art by Swapna Vora

Every day, judgment day
Chiru Chakravarty
by Swapna Vora

Chiru offers limbs, muscles, bones cloned with animals, shards of existence, of disaster. There is anger, suffering and chaos, with no well remembered limits, no recognizable boundaries. We momentarily halt and watch the anguish in his works. Are these responses to catastrophes, humanity's disasters, bloodshed, generated violence, mindless mobs?

Chiru prefers things and words to be short and succinct, like haiku, offering a moment of insight and perhaps chaturiya, the fourth state of awareness. His art has dull vermilion, sepia, sienna, umber in huge blocks. There are bones, twisted muscles, tortured ligaments and sinister, frenzied suggestions of human interiors, all deliberately thought out, very painterly. Art straight from his being, his 'antakaran'. What urges him on is necessity, not making beauty. "Painting is not my hobby or my profession. It is me. This is not for my self expression but my compulsion. It has no other function but that I must, like drinking water or doing yoga, something I must do to exist. It is essential for my being."

"Chiru's paintings bear eloquent witness to the body's torments:the fragmentary forms that stand in for limbs in his canvasses are often shown in torsion; their surfaces fold over one another, or are flayed open, or sometimes, remain knotted in suffocating embrace. .... These conditions, reflecting deep inner disquietudes as they do, form the distinctive emotional terrain that Chiru has charted formore than a decade now....
His is a compassionate vision of human kind as a race held in thrall by its insticts, its appetites, its raw passions; and yet the same forces can, if canalised, give it the protection of self assurance and dignity."