The visual grammar of these works is compact—each painting is situated in a moment where boundaries of the body expand beyond the lines marking the figure to include the elements which Buddhadev introduces with great consideration as metaphors or signs, pushing the vocabulary of the works away from the rigidity of realism, into an allusive and allegorical language. Careful viewing of the works will reveal shapes that follow no discernible correspondence to the material world: What may a grey orb with red strings that flutter like tongues signify in the belly of a lover who balances his love on his head? In others, known signs function as metonyms—a dark haze or a small fog can signal peace or turmoil. In earlier works, it is the river which is balanced with temerity between the arc of a limb, and in another, small boulders which rest atop the feet and the belly and in the crick of the neck. It is possible to wonder: how is the body a ledger for the heaviness of feeling, and an accumulation of expectations, mishaps, wonderings?  

In the new series, we can consider works where a figure embraces effusive clouds of paint, the wisps of colour seeping outward till it engulfs the body that strives to hold it. What is such a sight if not a hook sinking into our private histories of longing and desire, the search for a sense of safety that remains elusive, the essential unknowability of the other? In another painting, a couple stands across each other, connected by a pipe that they peer into, the possibility of sight occluded from their eyes through the tunnel that plunges between them—it is the lover’s gaze, always partial and in the case of another painting, inverted. It’s difficult not to think of the “book of clouds” that Joy Goswami writes about in a bittersweet poem titled Premik. The book of clouds that Gowsami describes in his poem drowns in “waist-deep water”, “takes the form of a river and bends”, and as the poem progresses the book becomes a vessel for time as duration—containing indefinable shifts and turns between two people, and within one person. Goswami reminds us that love is, after all, an act of self-deception and self-revelation; that even the sharpest pain can give way to melodic, melancholic laughter, stored in keepsakes, celebrated by transformations in perspective.

In Buddhadev’s hands, the contours of these figures command a characteristic of wholeness in their vulnerability. The dispersive lines of their bodies are often ambient and ethereal, balancing within their lightness and agility the rifts between societal perception and individuality. These paintings illuminate corners of the psyche that are otherwise subliminal, looking at many of these I am reminded of how often the pace of life removes us from perceiving what lies in front of us in detail, or discern the concealed scaffolding which supports the conduct of our life. Buddhadev is interested in exploring such enframing devices and overlooked details that shape the peculiar logic of living, its penchant for absurdity and the nonsensical, tragedy and humour held in the same breath. Buddhadev’s paintings are flush with aspects of the strange and inexplicable that emerge from his reflections on the everyday as a site for philosophical enquiry—What is happiness? What does the thrum of life tell us? What gleans in the space between tragedy and beauty, the place in-between such extremities?

In the final lectures before his untimely death, as if in answer to Sartre’s famous dictum “Everything has been figured out, except how to live”, the French philosopher Roland Barthes considered this question, placing it in the title of the lectures: “How to live together: Novelistic Simulations of Everyday Spaces” and turned to instances from literature that described various models and forms of living. To capture the mercurial dynamic between individual and collective life, between autonomy and belonging Barthes coined the term “idiorrhythmy”, taking from idios (particular) and rhuthmos (rhythm, also rhein or “movement of the waves”). Barthes recounts a scene witnessed from his window—a mother walks briskly ahead, her child struggling to keep up. They are walking together but their rhythm is not aligned—one of them feels the tug that pulls them out of step. In exploring scenes from novels that capture different states of such rhythms between people, from a sanatorium to an apartment building, Barthes considered the development of idiorrhythmy by people no less than an art form—to live with others and to hold oneself in place. Claude Coste describes idiorrhythmy as “life-art”, a search for “sociability without alienation” and “solitude without exile”. For Barthes, the way to understand the possibilities of idiorrhythmy is by studying certain scenes in stories, a methodology that is “specific, localized”, and yet from such particularity emerges ideas that inform the structure of many other lives.

These paintings tread the pathways of the mind—they are not the clear, reflective surfaces we encounter on walls and in our rooms, but journeys in the mist of thought. Buddhadev mentions the adages that flow in baul singing, the wisdom of Bhakti poets, and his extended considerations on the world around him—the transcendent truth that drives all the acts that fall between the cycle of sleeping and rising, and our own efforts to bring meaning, if not coherence, to the shape of our lives. As we speak that afternoon, the calls of birds grow louder and there is an unexpected storm, bringing leaves from the tree outside into the room. I look again at the paintings and see signs of life beyond the body, its elongated form lending easily to other experimentations—fantastical amalgamations of objects, birds and animals with persons, many torsos sprouting from the same waist in tentacular forms, and in one particularly striking work, heads in an amphibian form, swimming towards what lies beyond the edge of the page. None of these seem out of place, their strangeness at home with the frictions of being and becoming. In a line from the poem 1967, Bhaskar Chakravarty writes, “That I’m still alive and active is a strange thought/ According to Cheiro I should have died last year / But the breeze still plays on my body everyday”. Life continues in odd and surprising ways, these paintings seem to say. The man will carry the fish on his head each morning, and mouths will come together to chatter and disperse as the sun will rise and set. It is on the horizon of such infinitely occurring moments that we will come to rest our heads.