When filmmaker Dharmendra Nath Ojha decided to make a documentary on abstract paintings, Chaudhary’s work was the perfect medium for Ojha to script the journey of abstraction. Ojha’s 20 minute documentary A Stroke with Square required two months of research and seven days of shooting. The documentary is being screened at the Kolkata Film Festival on November 13, and will be screened at the Mumbai International Film Festival in January 2008. The film’s clippings and posters were showcased at the world’s largest cinema hub, the Cannes Film Festival 2007, by a group of NRIs who thought that it represented the essence of Indian docu-dramas.

A Stroke with Square finds space for masters of abstraction like Dali, Picasso and Hussain though it is primarily Chaudhary’s sense and vision of the abstract which is being used to tell the story. “A painting is nothing but time frozen in a frame, and time terminates at the juncture that it meets the art that captures it. Art can surpass boundaries of time but can never define the infinite,” says Chaudhary who has been an abstract painter for almost 12 years. Using colours and the camera, the film flatters the fluidity of space, time and art to inspire abstraction. Chaudhary’s square canvases lend the dark hues to the camera frames, while the camera follows the artist through his moods of abstraction – from a dark, rainy evening and a cascading shower to thick red paint knocked off a table.