Nikhil Chaganlal

The rules of genre dictate that the interior and the landscape are counterposed to one another. While the interior concentrates the viewer's imaginative energies within an intimate woven from objects suggesting narratives hidden in plain sight, the landscape urges the viewer to amplify those energies across a panoramic vista that celebrates expanse and promises sublime grandeur.

By one of those of practice that confound the grammarians of genre, however, the interior can sometimes offer us panoramic sensation even as it locks our gaze within a three-walled theatre in which the horizon appears, if it appears at all, through the occasional window or door at the further end of its illusory depth.

The room, with its objects functioning as clues awaiting activation and its miniature distances calling for traversal by the viewer's senses, becomes its own vista.

The interiors that Nikhil Changanlal evokes in his recent paintings are atmospheres rather than spaces: cast as memoirs, they capture the flavour of remembered occasions, the texture of half-expressed desires, the fugitive moods that linger in the aftermath of conversation, festivity and the disclosure of self to other. In these frames, the artist fuses the actual with the imagined or symbolic he merges features that exist, in childhood homes and adult staging-points he has known, with tropes that emblematise styles, periods and idioms of comfort that he cherishes. But where such a subject might have tempted a more flamboyant temperament into a defiantly self-indulgent playing at decadence, Changanlal brings to his treatment vulnerability that verges on reticence. His gestures, as he invites us into these atmospheres, are those of discreet unveiling rather than flagrant display: his approach is tempered by an awareness that he is about to share a private fantasia with a viewing public, always a fraught encounter.

This discretion does not, however, cramp Chaganlal's suite of interiors into etiolation. On the contrary, his paintings are marked by lavishness of handling. The Images are worked up in luminous applications of paint, which may thin out to glaze the sky, flow down as a diaphanous curtain or settle in the form of a glass table, but which can also thicken into substantial impasto on an incandescent red wall or a blind bunched in the grip of a sagging but determined sash.

Chaganlal's Palette is Palpable, his column almost edible he delights in deep-welling alizarin, relishes glowing viridian, savours blazing turmeric. Elaborated in considerable, even sumptuous detail, these interiors are alive with objects; the artist dwells with loving attention on the appointments and furnishings of each room, whether it is the piano or the violin , a drape or a blind, a vase or a lamp, a bureau or a chandelier, a cushion or and occasional telescope pointing to infinity.

Tapestried together, these details produce an embrace of intimacy. As motifs, they do not serve the precise metaphorical purpose they might have done in a classical allegory, nevertheless, they signify an idealized ambience of refined domesticity, security and ease. For Changanlal, the interior is not a spatial description, or is it simply an immersion in a time-warper's daydream of elegant living. The interior is a wager on interiority, on an inward retreat that can unquestionably be called home: an ideal zone of belonging where nothing will discomfit or disquiet the resident self, intrude upon its serenity.

There's no one at home, though Chaganlal's interiors are unpopulated the signs of a human presence in these rooms are a recurrent pair of slippers left near a rug or a rocking chair, an umbrella leaning against a wall, a hat propped on the back of a chair.

I would hazard the speculation that, throughout the history of art, the marvelously rendered interior has been charged with the symbolic resonance of the womb. Here is a space redolent of amniotic belonging, a cave from which there is no expulsion. And since life is, an exile from the womb, the interior becomes a shrine to this originary space, a homage to a lost harbour.

Changanlal' interiors may operate within the norms of genre, but they are not generic. Not only because they portray the interior in diverse versions, not only because they construe the binary architecture of inside and outside through several pictorial strategies, varying the ratio of implied within and implied without, but because, intuitively as it may be, they question the premise on which they stand.

As we have observed there is an apparent solidity, opulence and ease intrinsic to what Chaganlal chooses to evoke. By contrast, there is a persistent agitation inherent in the how of his activity, in the manner in which he evokes his interiors. What redeems his paintings from being merely effete genre pieces is the quality that these rooms and their objects possess, of being tentative, somehow askew, out of joint, in flux. Consider Changanlal's method of dealing with mass and volume the blinds, the window frames and awnings are often set awry, rather than disciplined into well-behaved props, the wine glasses and vases arranged on tables seem wobbly, because they have pasted onto the picture surface, one flat plane on another, rather than positioned in occupation of recessional space.

Elsewhere, a sleight of scale and depth allows the piano to loom over a couch and a chase to suggest the contour of a human being stretched out. Curtains ripple and crackle while their sashes snake into the air, chandeliers swing ominously. Everything seems to be melting, tremor-struck or provisional here, as though these rooms symbolized passages of transition between one state of being and another. The apparent stability of these paintings is held in counterpoint by a persistent undertone of unease.

Earlier in this essay, I observed that Chaganlal's interiors are designed to keep their resident self proof against disturbance. It is evident, however, that the resident self - which never appears in these paintings - carries with it, wherever it goes, its own capacity for disquietude. It is this interplay between contending forces that imparts vibrancy to Nikhil Chaganlal's paintings: between comfort and bewilderment, home and exile, security and uncertainty. To his credit, the artist has allowed himself to express this state of productive contradiction - which is the true, underlying theme of his interiors - even at the risk of alienating the votaries of soothing art who will no doubt be attracted to the ostensible genre-based subject that he has adopted here.

RANJIT HOSKOTE