Join Converge 45 for an in-gallery conversation between artists Srijon Chowdhury and Michael Lazarus on tarot as image system, symbolic language, and structure for artistic thought.
The conversation takes place within Chowdhury’s exhibition Phool, a new chapter in his ongoing project Sigil Cycle. Drawing on the Major Arcana, Chowdhury translates the tarot's archetypes into paintings and a sigil gate structure that invites ritualistic movement through space. For Chowdhury, the artwork functions as a physical spell, focusing on the image of The Fool to summon transformation and new beginnings.
Lazarus brings a related but distinct engagement with tarot through his limited-edition 78-card deck, which reworks the Rider-Waite-Smith tradition through flat color, radiating line, and a recurring mask-like face drawn from his painting practice. His deck reduces the arcana to stripped-down signs, trading ornamental density for graphic clarity while preserving tarot’s introspective pull.
Chowdhury and Lazarus will discuss tarot as a living visual grammar: a system of images that can be inherited, revised, abstracted, and reactivated through contemporary art.
Srijon Chowdhury is a Portland-based painter whose work integrates Islamic architecture, William Blake’s poetry, tarot and the Western occult tradition into an evolving cosmology. His narrative oil paintings move between uncanny realism and saturated, symbolic stylization, using recurring imagery such as flowers, family members, angels, devils and sigils as a personal vocabulary returned to across years and bodies of work. He is represented by P·P·O·W, New York, and Ciaccia Levi, Paris. Recent solo exhibitions include Cycled Through the Wildflower Arcana at The FLAG Art Foundation, Tapestry at P·P·O·W, Same Old Song at the Frye Art Museum and A Still Life at Ciaccia Levi. His work has been written about in Artforum, The New Yorker, Art in America, Frieze, Spike and the Los Angeles Times.
Michael Lazarus is a Portland-based artist whose paintings explore the relationship between structure and improvisation, order and chance, and the physical and pictorial possibilities of color and form. A recurring mask-like face appears throughout his work as a legible sign within shifting fields of geometry, fragmented imagery and accumulated surfaces. Lazarus emerged as an artist in New York in the 1990s, exhibiting with galleries including Feature Inc. and Andrea Rosen Gallery. His work has been shown at MoMA PS1, the Walker Art Center, the Tang Teaching Museum, the Parrish Art Museum, the Portland Art Museum, the Henry Art Gallery, the Las Vegas Art Museum and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, among others. He has been a Ford Family Foundation Fellow and a resident at MacDowell.