Chandan Bez Baruah
(b.1979)
Chandan Bez Baruah was born in Nagaon and completed his BFA in Printmaking from Government Art College Guwahati, Assam, and MFA in Printmaking from Visva-Bharati University Santiniketan, West Bengal. It was in Guwahati that Chandan developed a keener love for the forests, seeing them as an escape from the congestion of the city and a soothing retreat in a time of newfound loneliness. Chandan’s stark, mountainous undergrowth exists within ecologies and geographies of history, culture, and contemporary conflict. The artist has skillfully coaxed these images out of wooden boards because the woods itself is asking for revelation. There is an intimacy to these images, as if the artist has trekked us through the jungle to his most favoured haunts, asking us to stay silent and observe what he treasures and wishes to reveal. We are seeing things from Chandan’s eyes – the young man who once conversed with these woods and walked in step with Indian soldiers he would befriend as similarly needing a desi pair of eyes. Chandan has heard the songs of birds, the peep of frogs, the swift clicking buzz of beetles and the rustle through the leaves. He has heard trees falling in the forest. He asks us to use our eyes as ears, and hear their falling, too. Be a witness. It is only the act of hearing that makes these fragile treescapes real.
In the show, ‘If A Tree Falls (Somewhere In Northeast India)’, curated by Waswo X. Waswo, featuring recent works by Chandan Bez Baruah at Gallery Latitude 28. Chandan had opined that one purpose to his landscapes was “to see the insight terrain of the marginalised or the subaltern, and to situate Postmodern landscapes as encountering Romantic theory”. The truth of Chandan’s statement is evident when looking at the work. His works more sensitively on the postmodern approach of landscape. He works on a significant continuum of series, and a short take on his visual cultural practice in a confined and comprehensive manner. His references for the woodcut prints are his digital photographs. Meticulously carved upon medium density wood-fibre matrixes, these woodcuts nonetheless spring from the digital photographs which Chandan has earlier captured for reference. The artist’s inspired translation of these photographs, and highly skilled hand-craftsmanship, is astounding. The photorealist style he painstakingly employs is complicated by the chaos of the scenes; a chaos unlike the orderly compositions one might expect in more traditional and Pictorialist vocabularies, yet which holds a graphic beauty of its own. His attachment to the Northeast landscapes is used during the image making process. While using the curving tools he always goes through his experiences and this creates a peculiar attachment between the particular frame and him. It is here that the works open to emotional interpretation and atmospheric transformation on the wooden surface using wood carving tools or one can say through his expressions and visualisation. Devoid of human figuration or wildlife, Chandan unashamedly subscribes to the notion of the solitary observer, or, as the American photographer Ansel Adamas once put it, To the complaint, ‘There are no people in these photographs,’ I respond, ‘There are always two people: the photographer and the viewer.’ Yet, there are many more than two people in these woodcuts. There are multitudes. Chandan’s stark, mountainous undergrowth exists within ecologies and geographies of history, culture, and contemporary conflict.
Some of his exhibitions include ‘TIME WARP – an exploration of the unusual’, at Gallery Veda, Chennai (2021). ‘The Print: Matter in Matrix’, Gallery Latitude 28 at Sridharani Gallery, New Delhi (2020); 1st Print Biennale India, Lalit Kala Akademi, New Delhi (2018); ‘On the Threshold of Time’, Art Heritage Gallery, New Delhi (2017); 56th National Exhibition of Art, Lalit Kala Akademi, New Delhi (2017); 10th Triennial Print Exhibition, France (2016); Daejeon International Art Show, Korea (2015); 9th Triennial Print Exhibition, France (2014); International ICAC Printmaking Show, Mumbai (2014); Kyoto International Wood Print Exhibition (KIWA), Japan (2014 and 2013); 7th Bharat Bhavan International Biennial of Print, India (2011); 49th National Exhibition of Art, Lalit Kala Akademi, Bhopal (2006).
