Srijon Chowdhury’s work occupies a liminal space between reality and dream, where meticulous realism intertwines with surreal, exaggerated forms. Drawing inspiration from Andrew Wyeth’s mystic depictions of America, Chowdhury delves into the minute details of light and shadow, transforming the ordinary into something transcendent. His approach to painting, rooted in sensory perception and the materiality of paint, invites viewers to engage with his work viscerally. In his latest exhibition Tapestry at P·P·O·W, Chowdhury’s symbolic use of circular structures and welded steel fencing further blurs the lines between the physical and the metaphysical.
PLUS: Your work often oscillates between the realms of uncanny realism and highly stylized compositions. How do you navigate these contrasting approaches in your practice, and what do they reveal about your perception of reality?
SRIJON CHOWDHURY: I have to be excited by what Im painting. I love Andrew Wyeth and I think the desire to try for a realist aspect of my current paintings owes a lot to him. Wyeth captures a feeling of American mysticism that is hard for me to put into words. When I focus and paint “reality,” I tend to get lost in the details of lights and shadows on veins and skin, and I can’t help but exaggerate these strange lines that I see. When I was in college, I drew caricatures at a theme park and have always loved exaggeration. It looks stylized, but the lines and shapes are mostly what was there. I’ve been holding leaves up to the sun; there is so much to see, it’s unbelievably real. The other day my four-year-old son asked me if this was a dream or real life, I rattled off a bunch of possibilities until he said he was ready to be done talking about that now. I like falling into hallucinogenic thinking, but then you have to get back to beautiful reality.
P: Your work often immerses viewers in a sensory experience, particularly through the interplay of light, color, and texture. How do you approach the materiality of your paintings to evoke such a visceral response, and what role does sensory perception play in your artistic narrative?
SC: A painting always needs to be about the paint. It has to do something only a painting can do, something words can’t express. I have fallen into using a very small range of colors in the past, trying to understand what they do and how they make me feel. I am so interested in how colors and their combinations can make us feel. I’ve been painting for 20 years, but I am very much at the beginning of learning what paint can do.
P: In your exhibition Tapestry at P·P·O·W, the welded steel circular fence serves as both a physical structure and a symbolic enclosure. Can you discuss the significance of this structure within the context of your larger body of work and its relationship to William Blake’s poetry?
SC: A terracotta mosque built by my great-great-grandfather on the coast of Bangladesh has been a driving inspiration for about 10 years. Ive been making circular structures trying to mimic the mosque. Just as I want to see how paint and color act on a person, Im interested to see how a structure with belief embedded in it acts on a person. My structure takes 2 poems by William Blake, one about the lighter aspects of being human, the other the dark aspects, and turns them loosely into sigils, an old form of magic. I wanted to think about balance and interconnectedness, which I think is heightened by hanging works on the structure, seeing through it to other people looking at other works.
P: What does this spatial dialogue contribute to the overall experience of your work?
SC: The viewer, I believe, gets a heightened awareness of their own body in the space in front of and within the paintings, which I feel must heighten the feeling experienced. It’s an experiment; I want to learn from this show.
P: Your exhibition also features Mouth, a monumental painting measuring 30 feet across that illustrates subjects and motifs from your previous works. Can you share more about this composition and the different imagery appearing throughout the work?
SC: Mouth is a retrospective I gave myself, there are over 100 of my paintings from the last 10 years revisited in the creases of the lips. Portraits of my friends and family, flowers, monuments, angels, etc. Inside the mouth are figures happily dancing in red flames. When I first had the idea I was thinking of the flame dancers as a sort of apocalyptic climate anxiety fever. But now I am more comfortable with the apocalypse; it’s the beginning, and I am beginning to sense that the apocalypse has already happened, and I just didn’t notice.
P: Some of your works are more autobiographical in nature, including paintings of your wife giving birth to your children, and also appearances from friends and loved ones. Can you describe how these connect to your life and whether these should be read as a diary or narrative of sorts about your life?
SC: The easiest thing for me to paint is my life. I read too much meaning into things. Everyday moments gift me images that I think about for days or years until they eventually crystallize into a painting. And then I often come back to images as their meaning for me changes, and I need to make a new painting of an old image. My favorite movie is Groundhog Day; as a kid, I thought it was fun. When I was 20, I realized he had been trapped there for thousands of years and was essentially a god; it was almost a horror (maybe it would be a perfect double feature with Hellraiser?), right now I see that, yes, he was trapped but he also made a beautiful and meaningful life for himself. These paintings are people I know and have seen change, moments I see, but also moments I force into being; it’s a diary, a fiction, a poem more than a narrative.
P: Your use of floral imagery, particularly the cherry tree in Tapestry, appears to evoke a sense of fleeting beauty and cyclical life. How do these botanical motifs resonate with the themes of temporality and transcendence in your work?
SC: I love flowers. I used to work at Leach Botanical Garden, which is a quick walk down the hill from my house. The anticipation of certain things popping up and blooming slows down the year. In my own garden, some years can be better than others. Every year is a chance to get a little better, a little closer to my dream of having a garden that looks like a Bonnard painting.
P: Can you talk more about the references behind these works?
SC: Most of the tiny flowers are from the unicorn tapestries at the Met Cloisters and Musee de Cluny. I love painting and borrow so much: Frida Kahlo, Remedios Varo, Leonora Carrington, Andrew Wyeth, Otto Dix, Odilon Redon, Georgia O'Keefe, Klimt, Gustave Moreau, Lucian Freud, etc… If I see something I like, it will eventually end up in a painting.
P: Reflecting on your journey as an artist, is there a particular moment or experience that you consider pivotal in shaping your artistic vision?
SC: When I was 21, I read 2666 by Roberto Bolano. It’s a novel made up of five novellas. It’s sort of a mystery. By the end, I felt I had read everything except the actual story and that the empty space that was left, that I had read around and danced around, could be filled with the whole world. I have wanted to make paintings like that ever since.