Srijon Chowdhury
The Spotlight series includes a new or never-before-exhibited artwork paired with a commissioned piece of writing, creating focused and thoughtful conversations between the visual arts and authors, critics, poets, scholars, and beyond. In this iteration, the Spotlight features Srijon Chowdhury’s Cycled Through the Wildflower Arcana, 2025. A text by writer and cultural critic Doreen St. Félix accompanies the presentation.
Srijon Chowdhury
Cycled Through the Wildflower Arcana (detail), 2025
oil on linen
48 x 96 ins.
121.9 x 243.8 cm
Grass Consciousness
By Doreen St. Félix
He led us to our bedroom. The request was to arrange us in space. He asked us to face each other, which meant we would not be facing him, the painter on the other side of the room. He directed us. Place your right hand on his left shoulder. Cup her waist with your left hand. Now, turn your cheek to him. Don’t look at him. Yes. You can look at her. Silence. A murmur of hesitation. Before the murmur the only sound in the room had been our nervous breathing, a sound that sprung from background to seem deafening and animal. No, yes, look at him. The seconds he had disappeared to the periphery of my vision had rendered him a stranger, so staring into his eyes made the liquid in my own burn. The painter was satisfied, he left the bedroom. We longed for his authority. We did not see him for three months.
The painter lives in the most Northwestern American corner. He works in a studio adjacent to his home, a three hundred and fifty foot shed with a vaulted ceiling that resembles a barn. The painting in question materialized before him over the course of nine months, a gestational period. He is drawn to ruptures, like birth, like fauna shooting forth and multiplying without end, like blue blood vessels making themselves known under skin, like the end of the world. He pushes the saturation of his paints to simulate the ecstasy, the chaos, and the liveliness of all that rupture. A cast of apocalyptic figures appear and reappear in his tableaux, the wraiths, the demons, the angels, the horsemen harbingers of final earth cataclysm, frequently set against wildflower tableaux, jarringly. There is a sense that he has over the past twenty years been painting across his prolific oeuvre one painting, lively and macabre, the story of the cosmos. Like William Blake, with whom the painter is always in a kind of dialogue: “To see a World in a grain of sand / And a Heaven in a wildflower / Hold infinity in the palm of your hand / And eternity in an hour.” He has painted all of hell in the hole of a human mouth.
But what came first? The cosmos or consciousness? He had become, of late, more and more aware of his own breathing. The painter ricocheted between feelings of dread and feelings of relief. Life is so easy, he would think one moment, breathing in; Life is so hard, breathing out. Contraction, distension; swelling, evaporation. The swing of emotion revealed to him a compositional rhythm of concentric circles. The orientation he demands with his paintings, he knows, half-consciously, is the horizontal, as if the panels of swirling viscera and translucent skin were scannable vistas or landscapes. The circles would form a sort of spring of experience, and they would be punctuated by whirred, iris-like circles, transversals of each other, like yin and yang. In the interior of the overlapping circles, he would paint his translations of the major arcana of tarot, twenty-two scenes. This is why he posed us, to be The Lovers.
Srijon Chowdhury
Cycled Through the Wildflower Arcana (detail), 2025
oil on linen
48 x 96 ins.
121.9 x 243.8 cm
The months went on. He played a private game with himself, trying his hand on imbuing the painting with talismanic power. (His methods are suspended between spiritual divination and detail-oriented science). He wanted to avoid anything negative. He wanted to manufacture his own satisfaction. What about situating the Emperor in the midline, the card some associate with paternal certainty and fortitude, along the midline? Would that make him feel forthright and decisive? A self-fulfilling project? An opposite feeling took over. He habituated himself with the cards of transformation, upheaval, and death. He created a drama in the midline: the moon, a distant, trifle-like star, feeding into the towers, amidst his characteristic swirling flames, which led to the quietude of the hanged man, falling elegantly, to the portion of death, a small wedge, portraying a skeleton happily digging. That felt better.
The Magician, The Hanged Man, Justice, The Hierophant, The Hermit, the Devil, Wheel of Fortune. The circles bring them together in a torrent of relation. His figures, tubular, stretched anatomically, like those of Andrew Wyeth, are sometimes greyed out, brought into the metaphysical realm of symbol, although the models come from his life. The mother of his children, his children, his friends, himself. He is the painter who puts us in the mind of the pre-enlightenment, of vanitas warnings against impending death, of Fra Angelico’s cannibalistic devils, but he is stridently contemporary. He is hinged to the terrors and wonders of being human in the contemporary moment. Looking at one of his paintings one feels their own blood moving through them.
He called to say the painting was done. He called it Cycled Through the Wildflower Arcana. He showed us as The Lovers. He had swallowed and transformed us. We were gone. He was asked how he felt the work figured in his practice. He said that he still felt he was at beginning of his understandings of the qualities of paint. Laughing a little, out of disbelief, he estimated that this was the most complete of his works so far. It contained references to his past motifs. It had eaten, in a sense, the preceding tableaux, processing his world of heightened live-ness in one undulation of thought. He also said, that, in the end, looking at “The Wildflower Arcana,” he felt like The Fool. Life is so easy. Life is so hard.
Srijon Chowdhury (b. 1987, Dhaka, Bangladesh) is an artist living and working between Los Angeles, CA, and Portland, OR. Chowdhury received a BFA in Studio Art from the University of Minnesota Twin Cities, Minneapolis, MN, in 2009, and an MFA in Fine Art from Otis College of Art and Design, Los Angeles, CA, in 2013. Recent solo exhibitions include Tapestry, P·P·O·W, New York, NY (2024); Same Old Song, Frye Art Museum, Seattle, WA (2022); A Still Life, Ciaccia Levi, Paris, France (2021); Dandelion Song, Foxy Production, New York, NY (2021); among others. Chowdhury’s work participated in numerous group exhibitions, including Votive, Ciaccia Levi hosted by Florit Gallery, Islas Baleares, Spain (2025); History will say we were best friends, Podium, Hong Kong, China (2024); Eyes Unspoken, Adler Beatty, New York, NY (2024); Friends & Lovers, The FLAG Art Foundation, New York, NY (2023); among others. His work has been the subject of reviews and articles in artnet, Artforum, The Los Angeles Times, New American Painting, The New York Times, The New Yorker, among others.
Doreen St. Félix (b. 1992, Brooklyn, NY) is a writer and cultural critic. She is a staff writer at The New Yorker. In 2019, she won the National Magazine Award for Columns and Commentary.
Installation view of Spotlight: Srijon Chowdhury at The FLAG Art Foundation, 2025. Photography by Steven Probert.