Srijon Chowdhury at Foxy Production

Editorial Mag is spotlighting artists’ exhibitions that have been impacted by the pandemic.
See our other reviews here.

“Srijon Chowdhury” is currently on view at Foxy Production, NYC.
Look out for our feature on Chowdhury coming up in our next print issue. 

“Cruelty has a Human Heart,” reads the first line of William Blake’s, A Divine Image. The poem, originally published in 1789, is unsurprisingly still poignant today, and in its entirety appears almost super-imposed over an ethereal white horse and its passenger in Srijon Chowdhury’s expansive painting, Pale Rider. Featured in an eponymous solo exhibition at Foxy Production in New York City, Chowdhury’s works reinterpret traditional approaches to painting by subverting genre, medium, and mythology. Two clementines by a glass, one moldy and one fresh, suggest a plutonian motif of death and birth, while also serving to reference the practice of vanitas image-making. This dichotomy is echoed again in Flowers on Fire, featuring the endangered trillium and ubiquitous morning glory blooms, all ablaze in a neon cadmium—fire does not hierarchize. The same brilliant red lends itself to a rose, cupped in two hands, or suspended above a boy lying down. An Old Dream features a bouquet of roses, dried and anemic next to scissors in a milky dusk, illuminated only by a slit of the same lustrous red—a somatic proposal that perhaps there is life on the other side. If we cut away this darkness, will we find new life? – Rebecca Storm