Some people you just look in their eyes and their eyes are completely empty. Everyone’s always telling us about the world. The writer, the comedian, the dancer, the artists, our mothers. Everyone just talks and talks but nobody understands a thing. While time steps slowly down around us.
Time seems hardly to pass now. An infinity of voices reach out around us, and nobody knows what they’re talking about. We don’t understand the mysteries of the universe, or ourselves. The painter is a mask. With flowers tossed over him. His eyes are black holes. The universe pours into his eyes. The moth is drawn into the doctor’s office because the light is on. But why is the moth drawn to the light in the first place?
The Mask, 2021, oil on linen, 20,3 × 15,2 cm, Courtesy the Artist and Ciaccia Levi, Paris | Photograph: Aurélien Mole 
The Mother and The Child, 2021, oil on linen, 91,4 × 60,9 cm Courtesy the Artist and Ciaccia Levi, Paris | Photograph: Aurélien Mole
I walk the streets of Paris when I’m here and sometimes notice the illuminated window of an apartment building, a welcoming building with nice light fittings in the lobby, or an interesting façade, in a good part of town, and I walk under those illuminated windows and look up into strangers’ apartments and wonder who lives there, and what kind of a life they might lead, and what kind of a life might I have if I lived in this city, if I lived in that apartment.
What I enjoy about cities is how so many lives feel available, so many lives I might lead, other people might meet. And the same is true of paintings. They open windows to places we’ll never go, lives we will not lead and cannot understand.
Often in galleries I’ll walk by a painting and yearn to be part of that world, to step into that world. I’ve heard moths are drawn to the light, because they sense a darkness beyond it, on the other side, far blacker and louder than any we have known.
Exhibition: Srijon Chowdhury. A Still Life
Exhibition duration: 21 October — 4 December, 2021
Address and Contact:
Ciaccia Levi Gallery
t34, rue de Turbigo, 75003 Paris
www.ciaccialevi.com