Work · about 2010–2021
In Search of Truth
In his last decade Jai Zharotia painted with new freedom: strong flat colour, forms broken into floating pieces, words written into the picture, and finally a single line of paint. In Search of Truth gathers this late work, his final return to the mystery.
The late work is the largest body of painting in the estate, and it moves in four directions.
In the colour fields, figures, horses, birds and bulls break into flat, interlocking pieces of black, white and bright colour that float on orange, blue, green or violet grounds. In the Ego paintings, two panels sit side by side, an image on one and a single word on the other, written in Hindi or English: Ego, Untouchable. He described them as “fighting with ego”. In the Line works, everything is reduced to one gestural stroke of black or colour crossing the sheet like handwriting. And in the gold-ground drawings of 2018, white cut-out figures and trees are drawn in ink on gold.
His own words, below, from a recorded conversation translated from Hindi, describe the path exactly: from the visible, through distortion, to the formless. These works are where Jai Zharotia’s long search comes to rest.
“First I painted the visible. Then I distorted it, to put more feeling into it. Now, beyond distortion, I am trying to go into the formless, because I want to hold the thing that is in neither a dream nor an image, only a feeling.”Jai Zharotia
Works from this series will be added soon.