Samara Art Gallery 

The etching tool moved rapidly on the metal plate creating streaky night sky. Mysterious fog emerged soon, daubs of ink settled on the crevices created spots rapid strokes manifesting the stripes. Reason disappears behind the darkness of paranoia resurrecting the animals of darkness, often agitated, ready to spring the viewer their horns intermingling with the twisted branches of the tree. The distant moon is spreading the shadow not the light. The turbulent sky expects the tempest anytime. Symbols of fear, darkness, tempest and the eerie shadows in the moonlight come through the prints of Shachi Shah.

Shachi Shah’s work invites the viewer to this world of darkness and paranoia. The fear has always been the subject the artists dealt successfully in the past. The Surrealist tendencies and incongruous imageries and the visual rhetoric of collapsing the contrasting often excited the creative minds and in turn the common man. This collapsing can, at certain occasion create the grotesque. The grotesque can induce the contrasting aesthetic experiences of fear and/or laughter.  Along with this Shachi internalizes the angst of the Cheetah running away from its area of habitation, cleverly signified by the burning house by the artist. Placing the fauna in human habitation and accessories like the Balloon, Umbrella and the mirror Shachi contextualize the life of the animal and the representation of innate feeling of caged suppressed and hunted by the constrictions of society.