Bernard Imhasly
JASMINE SHAH VERMA
Bernard Imhasly
The Canary in the Coalmine
Bernard Imhasly (Author and Journalist)
Switzerland
Bernard Imhasly (Author and Journalist)
Switzerland
When Ajay Chakradhar speaks of his childhood home, he remembers that none of the children’s
playgrounds had even a blade of green grass. They were of stone – iron ore, the color grey, and
lifeless. He makes this statement without the slightest trace of bitterness. In fact, he gets excited
when talking about the landscape of his youth. It is covered with minerals, of various hues of
grey and black, interspersed with the glimmer of mica. When he speaks of the Jungle of
Chotanagpur it does not consist of trees and thickets of bushwork, but mounds of coal deposits,
rocks, and sandy soils. He enumerates their names with poetic intensity: murum, mica,
manganese, hematite, cadmium, and uranium. And he muses about their intrinsic power.
Yet he also recognizes the absence of nurturing – the open wounds of surface mining, the empty villages, their inhabitants having left, either emigrated or living in housing colonies of the mining companies. “There is nobody there with whom I could connect”.
Chakradhar is famous for his use of ground and powdered minerals. He mixes them with paint, oil, and adhesive, evoking both desolation and vigour, disruption and beauty. His work could be described as an attempt to go beyond these binaries. They express both harmony and dirt, despair and fascination. He feels at home in the underworld of this earth, turned upside down, in the dirty metallic greys and smudged blacks, attractive and revulsive. The glimmer of mica in a field of rubble expresses both the violence of the excavation and the treasure it has found. It reminds him of the black night sky, whose very blackness makes the stars shine with such Intensity.
The boulders and rocks that provide the basic formal vocabulary of many paintings lose their angularity and sharpness. Rather than the detritus of dynamiting, shredded and torn apart, the hazy film of coal dust gives them the soft contours of an organic form. Chakradhar’s aesthetic credo is that all binaries are reductive. If not life, then at least art must encompass contradictions: There is beauty and hybris in the violent transformation of nature, energy, and destruction.
Yet he also recognizes the absence of nurturing – the open wounds of surface mining, the empty villages, their inhabitants having left, either emigrated or living in housing colonies of the mining companies. “There is nobody there with whom I could connect”.
Chakradhar is famous for his use of ground and powdered minerals. He mixes them with paint, oil, and adhesive, evoking both desolation and vigour, disruption and beauty. His work could be described as an attempt to go beyond these binaries. They express both harmony and dirt, despair and fascination. He feels at home in the underworld of this earth, turned upside down, in the dirty metallic greys and smudged blacks, attractive and revulsive. The glimmer of mica in a field of rubble expresses both the violence of the excavation and the treasure it has found. It reminds him of the black night sky, whose very blackness makes the stars shine with such Intensity.
The boulders and rocks that provide the basic formal vocabulary of many paintings lose their angularity and sharpness. Rather than the detritus of dynamiting, shredded and torn apart, the hazy film of coal dust gives them the soft contours of an organic form. Chakradhar’s aesthetic credo is that all binaries are reductive. If not life, then at least art must encompass contradictions: There is beauty and hybris in the violent transformation of nature, energy, and destruction.
JASMINE SHAH VERMA
Jasmine Shah Verma
Art Critic & Curator, The Viewing Room,
Mumbai, 2012
Art Critic & Curator, The Viewing Room,
Mumbai, 2012
Ajay Chakradhar uses minerals like mica, manganese, and iron ore in an abstract play of
colours and textures. He also uses coir, sponge, and wood dust with acrylic colours on paper or
canvas. Originally from Jharkhand, he grew up around mines amidst nature’s bounty. Now
based in Mumbai, Chakradhar uses the minerals that enrich the soil of his native place to relive
his past and also to express his concern over the depletion of natural resources by the rampant
growth of industries. He remains sympathetic to the people of the region who continue to live in
the poorest conditions in spite of the land reaping riches to the mining industries based there.
He uses a non-representative visual language of colours and forms. He says: “If art is a way of
telling a story, colour is the medium of expressing an idea or feeling. My homeland Jharkhand is
rich with natural colours silver from mica, brown and green from iron ore, and black, and grey
from manganese and copper. I use these colours in my work. My intention is not to separate or
differentiate but about the possible overlap and coalescing of metaphysical and social concerns
attached with the idea.”