26th November 2023
Art theory is anathema for the artist who prefers to let the blank canvas guide his brush.
A restless maverick, artist Jatin Das has an innate preoccupation with the human figure. He sketches and draws figures in motion with conte and ink and charcoal and has a sharp eye for tonal variations. He paints with water colours – his most cherished medium – oil and acrylic, using colour wash to reach the desired texture.
Das’s long-awaited retrospective, which opened for public viewing on November 8 at Delhi’s National Gallery of Modern Art, is a riveting time travel through 60 years of the celebrated artist’s remarkable oeuvre.
There is an undercurrent of drama in the drawn forms hung across the museum gallery. They give the sense of timeless figures lost in space that occasionally seek to withdraw into their own essence, keeping their distance from the viewer. Often, the figures seem to emerge from the blurred edges of the artist’s consciousness, giving us a glimpse into the psyche of a poet who lives within the obdurate fault line of the boundary between implosion and harmony.
“My paintings are not narrative,” said Das. “They are metaphoric, poetic and suggestive. Human anguish, pain, affection, tenderness… it is all expressed through these energised bare figures.”
The artist’s body of work subverts the need for rootedness and fixity. He seems to search for irreverent ruptures that explode into lines of flight. His lines do not walk languidly – they seem to run, drawn so fast that ideas cannot keep up.
“When I look at an empty canvas or a bare sheet of paper, I feel I am starting to paint or draw for the first time,” Das told this author in an interview at his cluttered studio near the Qutub Minar in Mehrauli. The space doubles up as the chamber of his mind, a laboratory of creative ideas. “It is important to learn, unlearn, reflect and then do what the inner mind says.”
American writer Susan Sontag voiced the need for art criticism that would essentially let the artwork be what it is and not convert it into a field of ideas. Das too scoffs at art theory and an excess of interpretation. “Art is a visual medium that speaks for itself,” said Das. “It does not need to be dominated by art theory.”
Bold in his pursuit of visual language and in his escape from banal compositions and techniques, Das gives his visceral, erotic forms the freedom to emerge from the constructs of memory, somewhat like reverse origami.
Keen to keep political reference or social commentary as oblique as possible, Das underplays the political element in The Exodus 2020 series of 200 ink paintings on acid-free paper. The series – a visual diary filled with images created day after day during lockdown in the forced confinement of his home – is one of the starkest and most definitive chronicles of the plight of penniless migrant workers leaving the city.
This might appear to be a sudden seismic shift in the oeuvre of an artist who has created the myth of drawing with no reference to time and space, but it isn’t. Thirty-three years ago, Das produced a poignant painting that depicted the brutal killing of street-theatre playwright and director Safdar Hashmi during a performance on the outskirts of Delhi.
Maintaining his fidelity to human figures, he has recently drawn more than 150 images of manual scavengers who live on the margins, risking death every day while cleaning sewers and septic tanks. Fifty of these are ink on paper, 100 made with charcoal on newspaper.