About
The origins of certain paintings lie buried in a seemingly distant past. So that, even when painters like Jai Zharotia decide to paint a flower or an equine, or what have you - a thousand earlier impressions have already left their mark on their mental plate. From childhood upwards these have been unconsciously amassed. Impressions of leaves and trees and winged creatures and so on, in a work like his, are invested with a particular order of haunting unfamiliarity of which the functioning-in -the -present -moment active part may know but little.
In painting an object, this artist is apparently preoccupied with shape and colour. But, on the margin of his conscious effort, other forces are surely at work. A consciousness, for instance, that his human, all too human, faces suggest epiphanies. An artist may not be unaware of such discrete associations, but he is surely likely to thrust them out of sight. For, only on the outer circumference of awareness can the same feelings or suggestions exert a legitimate influence. Not once in his work, has the painter pulled such ostensible influences from their marginal position to centre stage. The effect is entirely spontaneous, not a contrived fairy tale. His genre therefore is unlike those of the rather over-dressed paintings of the day that are born of a too conscious search for subjective drama. The magical or the dramatic elements in his art owe their existence to his grip on the obligatory formalities of pattern. Forms held in sufficient tension generate their aura of surprising mystery as inevitably as a flame produces lyrically winding smoke.
So that, whatever this artist is led to find outside himself, by looking, is largely the reflection of something which is already their inside - perhaps it is the red thread of the wandering muse. His physical eye, especially under the press of emotion can act like the lens of a magic lantern and project outward into nature, into the forms of clouds, foliage and personages, images which are very much present to his inner view. Even under conditions of only normal tension some such process is at work, persisting,. guiding and directing his eye to certain curves or volumes which bear a special correspondence with the rhythms pre-existing inside himself. Indeed it is just this reciprocal action - the mysterious symbolical shapes discovered without giving mechanical precision and solidity to the no more than abstract forms-concepts existing within - which produce those memory images as are of the essence of an imaginative vision like his own. It is chiefly this which lends a strongly personal flavour to his work, and it is it too which would seem to force him back to certain typical space relations or configurations, as certain type of compositional structures in all, or a major portion of his earlier paintings, even.
Such pre-existent rhythms are the deep-level conditioners - so one might call them - but of these any artist had better remain only nominally conscious, not more. Any insistent probing of those formative levels is likely to interrupt, weaken, or even destroy the natural flow of creativeness. Jai is wise, he does not appear to have ever interfered with the working of his own psyche.
Well, thus, though this work is one of still life - and of a medium that is literally still, you feel in its presence, the earth begins to run beneath your feet, and the clouds to race in the sky. In the chosen of the calm compositions, beauty stirs like a fabulous creature in the covert and your senses are assailed from all four directions of the compass.
So even as I watched certain of these of his works, I admit that a flush came on my features. Surely, this was a reflection of the animation of my mind, wherethe given images were as vivid and as restful as a tranquil sea. If this work had been merely static form, nothing of the sort could have happened. No, the quintessence ofJai's considered art is a labile green shoot, an emergent other world, a manifestation of the unknown in the desert of inert facts.
- Keshav Malik, New Delhi, November 12, 1998
