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When Portland painter Srijon Chowdhury was invited to give a solo exhibition at the Frye Museum of Art in Seattle, he asked himself, “What is the best kind of museum exhibit that any artist can give?” His answer: “Retroactively”. In an effort to create the effect of functional surveying with his first exhibition in the museum, he produced a series of new murals on board incorporating many of the images that have appeared in his work over the past decade.
Titled “Same Old Song,” Frye’s show includes not any of his old paintings, but glimpses of earlier work in the form of ornaments—things like morning glories, demons, angels, and knives. When creating the exhibition, the Bangladeshi-born artist came to see these painted quotes as a kind of self-portrait, so he crafted the concept: six works that accentuate his own facial features, all on a massive scale and in a very close-up. . “It turns the gallery space into what’s inside my head,” he told me during a studio visit.
Each of these six studies contains one giant feature that, upon closer examination, abounds in allusions to Chowdhury’s symbolic vocabulary. Measuring 10 and a half feet by 6 feet each, are the five adjacent panels made of oil on linen that consist of Mouth (divine dance), 2022, stimulates the sense of encapsulation. The inside of the mouth is a view of Hell, with boiled figures and skeletons dancing around the fire, images recreated from a work that Chaudhry painted as a hexagram against Donald Trump during the 2020 election. Around the mouth, in the wrinkles of the lips, about 150 figures of the work are rendered The former Chowdhury is poorly developed, as do the petroglyphs alluding to earlier civilizations.
The tension between epiphany and mystery remains a source of inspiration for Chaudhry. His 2017 exhibition “Theater of Revelation” at Art Gym at Maryhurst University in Oregon sparked the Book of Revelation, a series of biblical visions representing the trials and final judgments that await saint and sinner alike. For The Theater of Memory in 2016, a show at Portland’s Upfor Gallery, Choudhury reimagined the architectural structure proposed by the 16th-century philosopher Giulio Camilo, whose physical reminders of all important concepts in the viewing world promised omniscience. These ideas of sacred vision and predictions appear again in the 2022 Acts in the form of divine messengers providing help and punishment. “I will always come back to something,” he said. “I wanted to have ‘Theater of Revelation’ and ‘Theater of Memory’ on this show.”
Other panels depict some of the recurring motifs in Chaudhry’s illustrative works, including morning glory and the knife replacing the pupil and iris. Ain (morning glory)2022. Both figures appear in multiple paintings made between 2018 and 2021—works that, for Chowdhury, signify the thin veil that separates everyday life from the unknown.
The artist’s distinctive gestures include many historical artistic influences. Inside the cochlea of the right ear ear (good), 2022, holds a blacken angel slaying a mysterious, semi-transparent demon bearing a molten face modeled on Francis Bacon. These references connect Chowdhury with artists who grappled with beauty and horror, and explore their moral expressions by producing works that are connected with reality but expand on surrealism. He sees these symbolic representations as a way of responding to contemporary conditions: “In a moment when everything always seems terrible everywhere in the world, I feel the worst thing I can do is stop caring,” adding, “The modern world has begun to symbolize, and we are now at the end of Modernity. Symbolism is a good way to reserve that time.”
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