GALLERY LATITUDE 28 PRESENTS EXHIBITION BY CHANDAN BEZ BARUAH, ON TILL 1 MARCH, 2021

GALLERY LATITUDE 28 PRESENTS EXHIBITION BY CHANDAN BEZ BARUAH, ON TILL 1 MARCH, 2021

Gallery Latitude 28 presents the first exhibition of 2021 titled If A Tree Falls (Somewhere In Northeast India), curated by Waswo X. Waswo, featuring work of Chandan Bez Baruah.

Chandan Bez Baruah has meticulously executed woodcut print works seamlessly amalgamate New Media technique and age-old craftsmanship. A far cry from traditional pictorial landscape works, Chandan’s monochromatic vistas are a lens into the untamed chaotic beauty of forests in his native Assam, and the stark mountainous undergrowth in his works exists within ecologies and geographies of history, culture, and contemporary conflict.

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. 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. 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.

The physical show is exhibited at Latitude 28 Gallery, New Delhi open to viewing by the public. Visits by appointment only with all necessary precautions followed.