Phantoms of Physicality: Chiru's Recent Paintings

Chiru's abstractionist paintings are memoirs of the body. Even as they pull away from the gravitational drag of representation, his forms encode the grip and twist of muscle and ligament, the hardness and hollowness of bone.

Chiru's abstraction is based on the churning relationships of forms that are in restless flux, in perpetual motion, alternately embracing and antagonistic towards one another. In viewing his recent paintings, we trace the consequences thrown up by such situations of encounter: dark hollows where the surface has been ripped, suggestive of wounds; punctures where spears have pierced the skin; ligatures, knots and loops, a battlefield of limbs; the solace of folds and crimps, which can sometimes convey the sense of a Georgia O'Keeffe-style erotics in which calyx overlaps with corolla and petal exchanges confidences with leaf.

The internal anatomy of the body has long served Chiru as a key starting point. On looking back at the record of his paintings – active in a range of visual media, he has been painting for several decades – we see that he has been preoccupied by a shaman-like investigation of the viscera, as though auguries and presentiments were to be found there, and even, in the phrase of the Decadents, the future of the tribe. At one level, in these paintings, it appears that the stomach and the lungs, the pancreas and intestines, have all been exposed to the cold air of scrutiny. At another level, the artist seems to be inviting us to locate and identify the motive energy that holds these elements together, and to name it: whether as spirit, or soul, or self.

We do not always find the answer, as we navigate the chalky yellows and drumbeat-like reds in which these speculations are cast. We are often held at arm's length by these paintings, some of which are rendered as frames within frames, as though they were clinical pictures of predicaments rather than deep probes into the intensity of those predicaments.

Chiru's paintings put one in mind of the ecorche : the body, whether human or animal, stripped down to what lies beneath the skin, the essential mechanisms and reflexes of the fugitive self. At the same time, we think, also, of the effigy: the hollow man, the stuffed man, the creature and puppet of epic historical forces and archaic instincts. And everywhere, there is the touch of darkness: among the acts of jointing and the acts of pulling away, there is the shadow behind and the shadow between. In somewhat more mysterious and sinister vein, accordingly, Chiru's forms can also hint at clothes bereft of bodies, cowled hoods with darkness where faces should have been: phantoms of physicality.

Other phantoms inhabit these frames too; one of these is the spirit of landscape. On occasion, Chiru's abstraction invokes the panorama. Is that an account of rivers and foothills, we ask ourselves. Do we really see a ramping lion's paw striking at the earth, triggering off a flight of grey birds? Is that a wolf's tongue hanging out, or a limp banner? And then the pigments rearrange themselves in the mind's eye, ceasing to be the names of concrete things, returning to the kaleidoscopic play of allusive shapes. Chiru's paintings have always been the testimony of an eye that regards the world as a dance of elusive figures: a choreography that is constantly being composed and rephrased; that is being shaped, broken and re-made with every breath.