Drawing upon history, myths and literature, each narrative in the show Sheer Layers Uncover the Truth by Arunanshu Chowdhury creates a rhetoric of the transition between time and reality. His images have multiple connotations. The morphed images transform reality into a playground of storytelling. The cross-grafting of the perception and the actual identity of a character creates a new story.
Each work represents travel between time zones, where the images of cultural iconography show an account between reality and truth. The varied motifs, symbols can be readily associated with the known, yet on a second glance, another image pops up and adds another dimension to the story.
Using the found object is accentuated in the body of works titled Multi Cuisine. Drawing from an eclectic mix of cultures and consumerism, these works can be seen as a series of stories hidden in the forms of the mundane. The different treatment of the surface in a stark black enhances the image. Images of pixelated flowers overbearing a natural flower comment of the invasion of the digital world, sculptural female figures. Arunanshu freely accommodates symbols and emblems to create a fusion of thoughts.
Inspired by a visit to the Saghai forest, Gujarat, in the summer of 2016, the series of paper works titled The night falls… Leaving an afterglow establishes the artists’ persistent fascination with world of nature. Playing with pictorial spaces where images becoming symbols, creating an interface between two distinct worlds of the natural and the created, these works search for commonalities of existence. Birds encased in cartoon bubbles, figures from fables and mythology, removed from their original context, occupy the space to create a new narrative, a new world where balance is a thin bridge, made by man himself.
Using the found object is accentuated in the body of works titled Multi Cuisine. Drawing from an eclectic mix of cultures and consumerism, these works can be seen as a series of stories hidden in the forms of the mundane. The different treatment of the surface in stark black enhances the image. Arunanshu freely accommodates symbols and emblems to create a fusion of thoughts.
As in a forest, where, each form merges into the other to formulate the landscape, in The Disguise, green leaves become the bird and the bird becomes the forest, a social comment in the most subtle form on the loss of individual identity.
Feathers of extinct birds hovering on the surface of an ancient map as seen in Tinted Hues.
Coming back to a myriad of images as symbols, Two sides of a curtain creates a calm between the historical and the inevitable of the contemporary. Showing men from Indian miniature painting to paintings created in an age old Adivasi tradition on the walls of tribal homes, Arunanshu continues his need to merge the historic, culturally idioms and the current in a gentle yet assertive manner.
Arunanshu uses the power of visual images to ignite imaginations, evoke emotions and capture universal cultural truths and dynamics in his work. These works take us on a journey, if one is ready to travel.
The show is on till 31 January at TAO Art Gallery, Mumbai