Paul Gopal-Chowdhury
dal 16/5/2002 al 15/6/2002
Segnalato da
16/5/2002
Paul Gopal-Chowdhury
Art Space Gallery, London
The imagery of demons, angels and exotic creatures that has emerged in these new paintings has been brought about by long suppressed memories of a childhood in India.
Paintings of Heaven and Hell
Paul Gopal-Chowdhury was born in India in 1949 and brought up in England where he studied
at Camberwell (1967-68) and the Slade School of Fine Art (1969-73).
Success followed; regular exhibitions in England and abroad including
the Serpentine Gallery and Hayward Gallery, an invitation to select
and exhibit in the Hayward Annual in 1979 and Artist in Residence at
Gonville and Caius College and Kettle's Yard Gallery in Cambridge in
1983-84. Then, in 1991, he withdrew from public sight to embark on what
has been a ten-year process of change and he is now back with a set
of exceptional paintings.
In these new paintings, collectively titled Paintings of Heaven and
Hell has developed an iconographic language based upon a dialogue between two different visual worlds. These are
intensely spiritual paintings where images from Indian mythology share the same canvas-space as east London street scenes; quite unlike his previous work.
As he has written, "Paintings change when one has something to say. In my case a crisis nearly always accompanies this."
The imagery of demons, angels and exotic creatures that has emerged
in these new paintings has been brought about by long suppressed memories
of a childhood in India. However, the bald fact that these paintings
bring together two very different structures into one painting does
not explain their qualities. They register as meditative and accomplished
works only because the two contrasting elements have been combined in
a way that gives the impression of an overall vision, but without any
apparent sacrifice to their own particular identities. The London street
scenes are painted with local colour, perspective and space. The Indian
mythological scenes are painted in pure, saturated, rainbow-like colours,
but in both, the colours and forms shift from being dense and solid
to translucent and weightless, so that the whole maintains a precarious balance.
These paintings do not deal with ethnic issues; they deal with issues of language
and cultural identity in a new multi-cultural age. Borne out of the
concerns of an artist to find a way forward for painting, they are the
synthesis of a ten-year process of experiment and consolidation that
have the scope to develop in ways as yet unimagined. They may also anticipate
a way forward for generations yet to come.
Art Space Gallery
84 St Peter's Street N1 8JS
London