We live in an age of disenchantment and alienation and feel a certain discomfort in the difference between what we feel and that which we express. However, the effort to deal with this discomfort enriches our consciousness. The non-verbal experience of the full gamut of human emotion portrayed through art is often the gateway to being connected. In the light of this understanding we are presented with Jagdish Chander's sustained explorations of human spirit. Throughout his career Jagdish's work has been intimately concerned with the human body. The obsession with the figure reflects an outlook which places humankind at the center of the universe. The distortions may be interpreted as reflecting human alienation, isolation and anguish but also its joy and triumph. As the artist candidly acknowledges there are no ideal situations in life and each of us has to develop our own methods of survival while participating fully, physically and psychologically in daily life.

In the past couple of years, Jagdish has been concerned with the portrayal of ‘pure emotion'. For this he has employed the most direct form, the human face contorted into expressions portraying anger, bewilderment, happiness and triumph. However, adult rational consciousness achieved through thought, education and experience is not easily escaped, and a spontaneous _expression of feeling doesn't naturally translate into a re-awakened world of free untainted existence. In this light, it would be more productive to recognize how Jagdish's art reflects a desire to restore a balance between thought and feeling. Where much of contemporary mental life is pre-packaged, repetitiously and deadeningly familiar, and our attention is constantly hailed by a cacophony of voices telling us what and how to think, it is useful to imagine an approach to rationality that includes emotion and intuition. In these paintings, conflicting feelings emerge readable as anxiety, rage, despair, numbness, frustrated attempts to be heroic, and fragmented efforts to maintain at least some kind of recognizable human dignity amidst the pressures of the day to day. Jagdish's men, for the most part, emerge victorious.

Jagdish's artistic process includes building the composition slowly, layer by layer. The forms in the paintings that the artist has been working on the last few years result from his need to be expressive and at the same time transcend the recognizable and easily achieved. In the placement of textured face within a textured background on a large canvas, Jagdish investigates the relationship between form and space. Color, applied in quick strokes pushes hard against the boundaries of control. In this sense, gesture, – expression, and emotion are not rendered but discovered, even stumbled upon. The spontaneity in Jagdish's process allows for images and the feelings they convey to be ‘found' by the viewer, who in the process gets caught in the horns of an emotional response. This act of discovery heightens the force of the image as a source for reflection.

Visually and psychologically, these paintings manifest tension rather than present a restful equanimity. Remembering this can affect what we see when we look: perhaps we can identify with their revelation of emotion. Finding a new sort of nobility and heroism in these images of human faces which resonate with efforts to hold our own lives together in a world fraught with mistrust and trauma. We might recognize on some level an emotional kinship with the majestic, swirling and sculpturesque creatures in the paintings.

Beautiful images of classical integrity and harmonious proportions abound in the tradition of humanistic art, but they also live on in the subliminal, frequently debased ideals represented in advertising, popular entertainment, and the rhetorical posturing of contemporary discourse. Rather than affronting humanistic dignity and conventions of artistic skill, Jagdish Chander's images look for possibilities of representing the human form in ways that are in emotional accord with aspects of contemporary experience. In interior feeling this art is realistic.

The artist who truly expresses innerness does not copy, imitate or look for personal glory. This highlights a statement Jagdish Chander repeats often, how his struggle and ambitions has been for aesthetic and artistic integrity rather then personal fame. The purpose of his artistic _expression has been to create something of value that will invoke a deep sense of recognition that is felt in the body. The artist hopes that this emotional response is not only personal to him, but that it also touches others. The _expression of the artist's private innerness into the public objective world allows the opening of an underlying knowledge of existence to be exposed for all to see. That is the risk the artist takes in manifesting his deep emotional life, as it takes courage to expose one's emotions for judgment by others.

The arts communicate the very foundations of being human and celebrate the self in a language that is rarely articulated in any other way. Artistic sensibility is the awareness that there is more to this life's journey than the mundane, practical and instrumental everyday experience. The arts can reconnect us to beauty and express the lived experience of humanity in a particular time and place with empathy for the human condition. Jagdish Chander ‘ present preoccupations place him firmly as a descendent of this lineage.