Chittrovanu Mazumdar: An expressionist painter

Chittrovanu Mazumdar terms himself as an expressionist painter and describes art as a private act. To him, his art practice offers him the space and access to freedom; everything he conceives can move, transform, and dramatically turn around to become something else.

“There are structures and systems one follows up to a certain point but then gradually gets out of them,” is how he sums up his intriguing art process. Born in Paris, Chittrovanu Mazumdar could access two contrasting cultures from his early years. His vast range of references incorporates varied inputs from his upbringing in Paris and Kolkata coupled with a range of reading in English, Bengali and French.

He studied printmaking and painting at the École des Beaux-Arts, Paris. The artist received a gold medal at the Government College of Art, Kolkata. Of course, his art education started much earlier, as his father was one of the established avant-garde artists of his time.

His works were showcased at The India Art summit, 2009. He created a series ranging from large mixed media works in difficult and diverse mediums such as wax, metal, tar, light and photography. There were a few digital works of landscape and figurative imagery with wax and tar on mild steel. The artist was quoted as saying: “The blueprint for these is the cohabitation of opposites.”

According to him, the core idea was to juxtapose mythical reverberations of black & white by employing ‘light-hungry’, night-dark tar and also the trays of light, which feed those depths, simultaneously reflecting off them. His video, entitled ‘Sleep’, carried out the subtle interrogation of the surface wherein the depths unpredictably erupted through cracks in an apparently seamless skin. His more recent works are born as much out of his earlier conceptual/ literary engagements with cryptic suggestions diverse cultures offer.