NO TIGERS IN THESE PAINTINGS

At DAG, the ongoing show ‘Contours of Identity’ pairs F. N. Souza and Avinash Chandra, exploring Indian modernism through migration, self-fashioning, and the tensions between freedom, categorisation, and artistic legacy in London and beyond

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Lens: the rawness of his work explained away as something essentially Indian.

Chandra, on the other hand, internalised these tensions. His work moves away from figuration into abstraction, rhythm, and symbolic form. Sexuality is present, but it is folded into a larger visual language — what Tillotson describes as “bound up with lots of other things”. Bodies dissolve into landscapes, forms merge and repeat, and desire becomes metaphor rather than spectacle. Tillotson notes that both artists used sexuality as a route into inner consciousness. For observers, this was often racialised; for the artists themselves, it was simply a way of being.