Art Musings presents, Songs of Rebirth, a solo show of Nikhil Chaganlal. Chaganlal is showing after a hiatus of 10 years, and this new body of paintings has emerged after his shift to Goa. To quote from the catalogue essay by art historian and cultural theorist Ranjit Hoskote: “Rendered in vivid acrylic on board, Nikhil Chaganlal’s recent paintings are animated by a deep and complex affection for Goa, a feeling that combines penumbral melancholia with resurgent joy. These paintings embody the artist’s profound and decisive shift away from Bombay and Alibaug, where he has spent much of his life, and his reorientation of purpose in Goa, where he has found emotional repose and artistic renewal. Through these pictorial songs of rebirth, Chaganlal processes the implications of this shift in intuitive ways, savouring the freedom offered by his new and nurturing environment while taking account of the dissonances he has left behind. One can see a passionate regard for Goa’s architecture in its life-affirming diversity, a love of Goa’s unique placeness as articulated through its shapes and structures of habitation and settlement, congregation and worship. Chaganlal testifies to the vitality of Goa’s temples, churches, cathedrals, wayside chapels and guardian deity shrines, not asserted against nature but cradled within its luxuriance of forests, shrubbery, groves and wetlands. Technically, his palette is incandescent with reds, yellows, blues, greens, and oranges. But each of these colours is inflected with shadow. A luminous darkness forms the matrix of these paintings. Resonant songs of rebirth, they gain in depth and gravity by acting as elegies for the former selves that have now been sloughed off and interred in the past.”
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