Sibaprasad Kar Chaudhuri’s The River in the Sky at Emami Art unfolds like a meditation on the invisible grammar of form — the geometry beneath emotion, and the emotion that unsettles geometry. Spanning his Bhagalpur drawings of the 1980s and recent paintings from Santiniketan, the exhibition traces a painter’s lifelong negotiation between structure and sensitivity.
In Barari Woman I (1985, picture), a single upright figure stands amid a sparse field, its lines taut and solitary. The drawing, though nearly monochrome, holds the quiet pulse of landscape and memory — the faint rhythm of wind across grass, the resilience of those who endure. That same rhythm, decades later, migrates into his abstractions. The human contour dissolves, yet its echo persists in the vertical tension of his compositions and the meditative slowness of his colour fields.
A turning point came in Santiniketan, when Kar Chaudhuri discovered the hand-painted triangle motifs on local terracotta pots. In River in the Sky II (2025), those triangles reappear — not as motifs, but as instincts. The painting, divided into two planes of differing densities, suggests the meeting of earth and atmosphere, a dialogue between stillness and movement. The river of the title remains invisible, sensed only through the flow of colour, through the patient accretion of layer upon layer.
What lends these works their quiet force is not their geometry but their temperament. Kar Chaudhuri paints as if abstraction were a form of remembering: a distillation of place, craft, and emotion into structure. At times, his language reminds one of the rudimentary quality of S.H. Raza’s forms and the inward softness of V.S. Gaitonde’s meditations, yet it is somehow shaped by something entirely his own: the filtered experiences of a life lived between observation and introspection, between the tangible hues of Santiniketan and the ineffable shades of thought. His colours do not assert but hover — soft terracottas, greys, and yellows that seem to hold light the way memory holds silence. With these elemental hues and the simplest means — like a triangle, a pastel wash, or a measured line — he successfully creates a world both intimate and universal.