The Afterlife of Silence is the first-ever comprehensive book on
the still lifes of one of India’s leading modern painters. The book takes a
close look at the essentials of the European tradition of still life painting
and argues that Jogen Chowdhury’s works, while sharing certain common concerns
of the tradition also differ significantly from it, and are firmly rooted in
his indigenous situatedness. It explores how, in his still lifes, unregarded,
everyday objects are irradiated with new life and unique relational
possibilities. It also examines how his still lifes oscillate between life and
death, between stillness and animation, a movement that conceptually underpins
the cycle of nature and lived life, and how moments of silence and stillness
acquire afterlives—with trails of significations that often go beyond the
context of particular artworks.
The book analyses the development
of Chowdhury’s still lifes chronologically; a section deals with the
distinctive ways in which his still lifes negotiate with desire—and its
obverse, dread—and manage to create autonomous symbolic systems, addressing the
nostalgia of inaccessibility. A separate chapter examines how his familiar
organic lines, used to define human forms, are used in still life forms as
well, and in this context, several of his major works are examined closely.
This book features about
80 impactful images of Chowdhury’s paintings and an in-depth interview of the
artist by the author that reveals how the painter’s art is permeated by his
universe of ideas and ideals.