In Nikhil Chopra’s exhibition Fire his many bodies return to new, familiar and strange landscapes. This return doesn’t necessarily seek a resolution, but is a moment of reflection in times of transition for the artist, both physically and emotionally - a displacement from familiar ground and ecologies of care to the rigours and demands of a new, alien site. Chopra’s many beings are forged out of his insistence to embody instead of emulate. Once it’s time, he undresses and washes up, setting these selves free into an orbit of beings.

This act of letting go is ritualistic now – a method of chance and renunciation where they may or may not return. The landscape devoid of any presence of life, also nods to the possibility of wild worlds, untouched and thereby uncontaminated by the pressures of temporality, productivity and extraction. These seemingly pastoral, pristine visions concoct a resistance to the order of the world. Chopra doesn’t shy away from this act of rebellion, a rewilding of thought and making, but also of suspension and/or slowing time. The landscape is a different kind of protagonist in Chopra’s work – one of memory and mountains, the home and the sea. While they have on many occasions formed the setting for his long, durational performances, his bodies have never occupied the drawings as bodies. They have marked and rubbed, laboured, but never represented itself. This spillage of the body and the landscape onto each other also marks a moment of rupture, an incision on the time plane. This rupture presents the possibility for many pasts and futures to slip out. Here bodies in the twilight of the performance stretch and rest, rely and heal. The explosions, eruptions and fire in Chopra’s recent drawings represent many things – the forging of an idea or coming to terms with; a conflict and a desire; and states of unrest and discovery. Far in the distance, a fire fills Chopra’s skies with clouds of smoke. There is courage to these gestures of bodies and flames breaking the considered rustle of wind and waves in his worlds and sometimes the contemplative silences they hold.

-Mario D’souza