Artist Statement
Jai Chuhan creates paintings with layers of vivid colour, depicting the usually female figure in room-like spaces, that function as arenas for exploring themes of refuge, home and unhome. Abstracted spaces in the painterly interiors suggest mirrors, doorways or window views of nature as a kind of aspiration. The poses of the often-lone figure, sometimes from dance performance, focussed or blurrily glimpsed, express tensions between agency and subjection within polarities and ambiguities between genders, rethinking notions of voyeurism, eroticism, race and the gaze. There is a sense of figures operating as protagonists and recipients within social mores and networks of power where arguably expressions of sexuality by women have a greater sense of transgression. She brings a ‘female gaze’ to the depiction of the body within the tradition of Western painting including of the nude, also a sensibility deriving from Indian musical (and painting) compositions called ragas, that link to colour, mood, emotion and times of day or night.
Portraiture reveals relationships with the self and others over time, exploring mixtures of alienation and belonging, within the self in room interiors or in the city where the private and the public intermingle, with the self-portrait becoming a method to locate oneself. Each figure can be seen as a manifestation of how to create a visual equivalence to one’s emotions, each an exploration of self and an attempt to unpack the artist’s position in the world. The spaces depicted in these works equally form an important thread through the practice. In both intimate locations and public spaces, she is navigating how to claim space. How to occupy. Merging personal history with the transcultural currents of our time, inspired by her position as an Indian-born British artist.
The images express an empathy for human interactions, for small moments of fragility and intimacy, that are a part of larger narratives. With a distinctive handling of colour and paint where images are often demolished and precariously recreated, her art offers a density to connections with the human and with art.