Viewing Chandana Hore’s works in Burning in Solitude — dedicated to a front-line Covid warrior, Dr Sourabh Kole, and displayed in Debovasha’s gallery in September — felt like trespassing on the secret sanctum of a creative individual to eavesdrop on her conversation with herself. This is a space where memory keeps aloneness company and solace percolates into it from an invisible garden. Where the word, bethha, written in Bengali, could mean something denser than physical pain. Where the jatno (care) of the bagan (garden) could symbolize spiritual release. Is this anguish dulled or dealt with over time and eventually accepted?
This acceptance seems to be part of a calming, self-healing, philosophic introspection. In the present suite of paintings the motif is a face, a young woman’s face that’s often thoughtful, pensive, but not troubled, at times also dreamy, with a distant look in her eyes, at peace with herself. From her usual rugged strokes in oil that have often pulsated with emotional turmoil, Hore has switched to watercolour for now. She adds to it scribbly pastels and off-hand lines in ink and charcoal at times. Thin, transparent stains seep into each other with unbidden fluidity, leaving darker trails on occasion to delineate features like eyes and nose to retrieve an image from patches of paint. This gives them a fragile composure, a composure that suggests some kind of reconciliation within oneself, a coming to terms with temporality, perhaps: everything passes, even the intensity of sorrow.
It wouldn’t be inaccurate to say that the artist has largely been confessional in her art. The vulnerable intimacy that imbues these works comes through clearly. Ink doodles of elderly faces recur to indicate that their presence in the artist’s mind, even in absence, is a comforting emotional anchor. Labels like Ma, Didia, identify them as trusted family members, while two figures sitting with a cup, sketched with careless spontaneity, reinvent routine domesticity as a point of nostalgic renewal. As the girl’s face watches flowers bloom, a delicate symbiotic relationship unfolds: between plants and their care-giver. Undoubtedly, the romantic’s pick-me-up unfailingly remains Nature.
