SANDEEP JOHAL

THE CHROMOPHILIACS
Richmond Art Gallery | Richmond, British Columbia | Jan. 24, 2026 - Apr. 4, 2026
Text by Zoe Chan, Curator | Photo credit: Michael Love

”Chromophobia” - the fear of colour -“ manifests itself in the many and varied attempts to purge colour from culture, to devalue colour, to diminish its significance.” So explains David Batchelor in his book Chromophobia (2000). Historically marginalized and suppressed within European and North America, colour continues to be linked to notions of impurity, primitivism, and decadence.

This fear of colour within Euroamerican culture, art, and society reaches far beyond a simple preference pf palette. In some manifestations of chromophobia, colour is belittled as merely decorative - existing in the realm of the exotic and the primitive, the frivolous and the feminine. In more extreme cases, colour is reviled as foreign and outright dangerous. As Batchelor argues: “As with all prejudices, its manifest form, its loathing, masks a fear: a fear of contamination and corruption by something that is unknown or appears to be unknowable.” His thesis continues to resonate today with the amplification of so-called “neutral” hues in fashion, architecture, and interior design on social media, and the rise of white supremacist movements rooted in xenophobic sentiment, where whiteness is equated with racial purity, to be protected at any cost.

At the opposite end of the spectrum are the artists showcased in The Chromophiliacs. Profoundly inspired by colour, their multifaceted practices are deeply rooted in a myriad of craft practices, global aesthetics, and cultural traditions, from Persian miniatures, Coast Salish ovoid forms, and Mesoamerican mythology, to hyperbolic crochet, tropical plein air painting, and African American memory jugs. Repudiating the seemingly eternal rationale of the “white cube”, artists Diyan Achjadi, Moozhan Ahmadzadegan, Maru Aponte, Sandeep Johal, Yaimel López Zaldívar, Laura Meza Orozco, Osvaldo Ramirez Castillo, Malina Sintnicolaas, Charlene Vickers, and Jan Wade transform Richmond Art Gallery’s walls with their complex engagement with colour.

Inspired by Indian folk-art practices, Sandeep Johal brings her trademark artisanal aesthetic to the European still-life painting genre of the vanitas, which contemplates the ephemerality of life. In this genre, each painted object usually has a specific symbolic meaning; for instance, the skull representing death and the candle, the soul. 

Johal playfully shakes up these fixed codes, by inserting humble, sometimes humorous articles that have sentimental significance for her, from an apple core harking back to her father’s first Canadian job, in an orchard, to her childhood piggy bank to the orange marigolds and white snapdragons that bloomed in her mother’s garden. 

Expanding her practice into the three-dimensional, Johal reimagines the vanitas as a kind of altar or shrine through her installation of hand-sewn and embroidered textile sculptures. This new body of work, presented against a stark black backdrop, reveals Johal in an existential, elegiac mode as she contemplates the eventual passing of her parents, her own aging, and the enduring role of art in expressing this poignant awareness of one’s mortality. - Zoe Chan, Curator