There is something ethereal about Sajal Patra’s paintings. The very presence of his works transports the viewers to a different experiential realm where the absence of mundane weights that hold the human beings down to the earth imparts a sense of lightness. This experience of lightness, of being and becoming turns pleasantly bearable while engaging with his paintings. Sajal’ s/Patra’ S Works have been all about this experience of personal and collective transformation of the gross world into a world of enlightenment. As an artist who always travels to remote hills and valleys, Sajal’ s chance encounters with the spiritual people have become a point of departure in most of his works.
Amidst a million problems that haunt the physical world of human beings, an artist taking a detour to the world of pure experiences and enlightenment may look like an apolitical stance but Sajal has been doing this pilgrimage in and through his art for a long time. As an artist he has clearly stated that an individual cannot solve the problems of the world through his art but he could leave the world a better place for the coming generations by evoking a set of ideal, noble and elevated feelings among the people, temporarily during the encounter with his works. This temporality of aesthetical and spiritual experience would linger on when this face to face becomes an enduring engagement, through interesting perusal and at times by cohabiting with these paintings.
The present exhibition has a body of works done during the last five years, especially during the pandemic years, a time when each and every one in the world was thinking not only about the physical world but also about the inner world. The turning of gaze inwardly had helped the human beings to understand better than before, as they were forced to engage with the innards of their selves. This was a time of virtual pilgrimages, to such sacred destinations that people never knew existed within themselves. A cursory look at sajal’s creative oeuvre would reveal that for the artist the pandemic years had been on ideal time for furthering his time-tested concerns.
Sajal is a person whose art always tries to externalise his interiority where the spiritual manifestations of his own self matter more than anything else. These emblematic realisations of spirituality are suggestions that goad the viewers to do similar soul searches. Sajal’ s works also tell the viewer that the spirit like forms seen in various transcendental postures are the potentialities latent in themselves. To put it in nutshell, everyone is capable of having spiritual experiences, or in other words in each human being on the face of the earth irrespective of gender, age, caste, creed or nationality, has the potential to achieve spiritual heights and perform great deeds in life.
Music is one of the defining factors in Sajal’ s works. Rendering music into colours, forms, textures and so on is next to impossible, though Sajal has achieved this translation through his deep and wide experience. The sensory understanding about music is fundamentally different from the experiential ripples that it causes in the listener: it is an untranslatable feeling. As an artist, Sajal has found out a solution to this. He establishes a violin player and a flautist to convey his ideas about musical experiences. Here, music is a stand in metaphor for the harmony that his own self gains in the process of aesthetical meditations. Through the very act of painting, he achieves this harmony which is revealed through ethereal and mystical figures engaged in playing violin or flute. It is interesting to see how spiritual beings come out, opening the layers of existence, here the painterly surface, and impart the feeling of joy and bliss.
Sajal’ s painterly surfaces look translucent, permeating light both from inside and outside, creating a mystic feel around the central and peripheral events that take place within the pictorial narration. There are departing and arriving beings that often resemble human beings but devoid of their material bodies. The contours are defined by the lucid edges, however, they function as sprouting ends for other images. Some of them have anthropomorphic features, reminding the viewers of another world where the forms are flexible. allowing transformation and transcendence alike. Sajal paints those images with their necks and hands stretched out from their lean and shaped bodies as if they were aspiring to reach an elevated plane. However, the movements are not strained. They are fluid and rhythmic enough to make the viewers reach a serene feeling while seeing them.
There are certain leitmotifs in Sajal’ s paintings; lotuses, musical instruments, moving limbs, abstract forms that represent homes, ashrams/hermitages, hills. mountains and the fundamental shape of triangles, and revolving doors. As I mentioned before, there are various planes within Sajal’ s paintings and multiplicity of spaces is connoted through the representation of revolving doors. They divide the pictorial space as well as the events within the painting into multi-layered zones, into insides and outsides, and into Here and There, earth and heaven. Sajal, in his works, emphasises the idea of transcendence through meditation and transformation through journeys. A human being gets to enter a new realm of experience and bliss when he goes through the meditative processes, at the same time, in physical journeys also one could experience the transformation of self.
Bodies that have gone beyond the gross mass achieve a sort of light immateriality through ascending various levels of existence. There are certain hints of ladders and steps, and also Sajal gives special attention to the movement of the bodies that have achieved the quality of air or ether. Their movements are harmonious, musical and ascending, reaching the pinnacle where their heads are turned to spheres of light. This ascension of forms and achievement of light is the crux of transcendence and enlightenment. Sajal becomes a conductor of his self as well as the selves of others who have agreed to take up a virtual journey with him via the visual paths that his paintings have paved.
Sajal has been working on a new set of paintings which has a different materiality. These paintings could technically be termed as relief paintings but there are no conventional colours or materials used to build’ them. The aesthetics created here is absolutely new and unique. Sajal has created these painting on boards with fibrous husk dust, adhesives, torch and resin. In these works, Sajal recreates the journeys that he has undertaken as an artist to the places known and unknown not as an adventurer but as a pilgrim. There is a closer to earth feeling in these works for they resemble the textures of earth on different seasons. They are like a farmer ploughing the field using his animals and experience. One could discern the images that Sajal has brought in these works, his favourite leitmotifs such as the triangular shapes that resemble hermitages, homes, hills, mountains and geometric patterns. There are hints of light, shades, rivers, soil, sun, night and reverberations of chanting. The solidity of the surfaces with their sun-baked cracks gives an additional meaning to these works; a sense of eternity. Sajal also uses found objects like the flat plate of an iron box in order to create visual and textual embellishment of the works.
To conclude the introduction, let me detail how I arrived at the title of the exhibition, ‘Mist of the Enchanted Grounds-Coming out Enlightened’. This is a line from the 17th Century British poet, John Bunyan. In his classic poem, the Pilgrim’ Progress, he speaks about the ascendency of the pilgrim towards his destination, the point of meeting with God. His pilgrim named ‘Christian’ goes through various experiences before reaching his destination. Mist of the Enchanted Grounds is the area where the human faculties are not in their great potential. On the earth we all go through sluggish phases before we launch ourselves into action. Someone searching the Soul or self-realization also has to go through such periods of lethargy and inaction. And it is important to go through such phases before one comes out enlightened. Christian finally did come out as an enlightened soul. Sajal has gone through that phase of darkness only to emerge as an enlightened personality. So are the images in his works. After prolonged periods of lethargy, they too have finally come out enlightened. It is an allegory of our times too. With war and pestilence all over the world we are also going through a dark patch in history and sooner than later we would also come out sorted, of differences, clear of conscience, devoid of fear and completely enlightened.
JohnyML
Curator, July, 2024