The ancient term nostalgia, spanning from future to past, is a very special form of melancholia, if ascribed to the present it is enabled by paradox. Still a central theme today, nostalgia is the pain, the desire for projected and fantasised rapture that cannot exist and perhaps never existed, the pain and hope inherent in the ability to conceive an always elusive abstraction of consummation. Although the production of sensations is almost effortless, one can for example prick with a needle, and the description of the qualities that any sensation possesses might entail a degree of resemblance that makes a correlation possible, still the sensation of being pricked by a needle, then and there or anywhere, it is not. Many artists are familiar with expressing themselves literally, literature is after all an artistic medium. This may not be coincidental, the use of visual media as a means of representation by a scientist is ill advised as this visual expression becomes tantamount to the deconstruction of many taken for granted paradigms of science due to an academic bias toward literate or causal linear expression.
Narrative is linear, Action is solid.
One of the few academics of renown who has no qualms about the equation of his scientific and graphic production is Kirti Chaudhuri. Professor Chaudhuri has added dimension to linear literary representations of history, in his life-long confrontation with paradoxes of history, comparison, time and space, through the exploration of such themes as the architecture and landscape of power, of symbols, and the surreality of temporal beauty, to transcend logical and serial description of a world that itself transcends logical and serial description. In this effort his goal is not, and can not be, to unify but to provoke. As an artist-scientist to goad you into imagining the mellifluence, the honey dispersing through your fingers, to question the significance of the production and exposition of these images which are certainly a source to themselves, but may also transcend themselves, just as the inverted concept Venice, the city in the canals, represents much more than buildings on stilts. Mellifluence is nonetheless, like its serenest point of departure, an archive or source that exists exclusively through the efforts of its creators.