Artists

Jai Chuhan

Press release

Arrangements in Mood: Jai Chuhan, Feeling and Freedom 'I am not sketching something out to fill in' remarks Jai Chuhan as we stand in her London studio, birdsong echoing in the distance. Cradled amongst the artist's paintings— palimpsests of errant time, these striking pictures, larger than us both, resemble standins for human bodies. Colour planes—realistic and impressionistic; smooth and thick all at the once, scoop us into an embrace that stretches across vistas from 1990 to the present day. These evocative fields contour an iconology of witnessing and of being witnessed by myriad subjects, most of them women. They are alive in space, conjuring what semiotician and art historian, W.J.T. Mitchell claims to be the gap between verbal and visual media—a reality, where pictures demand something of the spectator. My eyes glide across a painting as if bruised by lustre. A pigment shimmers as it catches a stream of daylight that streams through a window. Chuhan's approach to painting is as expressive as it is archaeological. Developed over years as nature would have ordered, most images are often peeled back and assembled again with new skin and metaphor. Chuhan explains that it is in the 'materiality of the paint itself' that she finds herself. Her time is spent structuring 'mood'—whether her subject is a self-portrait in an imagined setting, a scene pulled from youthful memory, or an interpretive depiction of a sitter whom she has invited into her inner world. The pictorial cartography of her landscape pulses with the life of ancestors. Each image is cinematic, a little rounded, porous as a piece of music. It may be observed akin to a play watched inside of a proscenium theatre. Regardless of the pictorial dimensions or subject matter, every painting observed alone stirs its own set of feelings—unspooling rooted embers. This is the work of a generous artist practicing at their masterful peak—making art for themselves, and by virtue of her cultural disposition, background and movement has developed an art, which invites the onlooker to find themselves inside her worlds. You can complete the final piece of the puzzle. To each of us, a Jai Chuhan painting is entirely our own. As American author Alice Walker prompted in letters, Jai Chuhan does for contemporary painting. She claims space for women not merely to exist, but also, to observe, and to listen to other women. Take for instance her painting Refugee Girls II (2026), on view from June 15 to June 21, 2026 at Air Service Basel 2026, Lo Brutto Stahl, Basel. These spectral women in their red saris hold our gaze, their heads slightly tilted as if about to break the fourth wall. Before them is a window that parses to historical order or is it a screen: Another realm held at proximity and distance. Above the three centrifugal figures a small picture hangs suspended in a veiled silhouetted room—a metaphorical process of masking and unmasking. Together, these forms generate a constellation that is inspired by the artist's personal archive, her study of voyeurism in Western museums, the role of ancient sculpture, as well as the possibilities of inner feeling. The artist's masterful virtues of structuring space can be traced, almost as if through each layer of paint as one holds steady, as if looking through the seasons of time, at Conversation III (2026). Here one can sense the brutal shiver of the protagonist's isolation: is this a self-portrait? Her shoulder is arched against us. She is wearing a cocktail dress in abundant yellow hues, including cadmium. Or is she perhaps in an indiscernible barmaid's uniform? Her presence bristles, as the scarlet red that marks the scar of her sombre mood—a shade found in her face, transpires again within a band of colour that is plaited from the figure's waist down. A gentleman sits out of focus, in waiting, arched. Behind him, translucent windows lead us out to a street scene evocative of water lilies that are smudged— rising, into thin air, transmuted to dust; the atmosphere is celestial. We are suspended—in that pensive instant between life and death, wakefulness and sleep: what will happen next? — Omar Kholeif