Mystery and Fantasy

As a young student, seriously ill, Jai Zharotia read the Bhagavad Gita and began to ask who he was and who sustains the world. Science answered some of it. The rest, the gap between the known and the unknown, he called mystery, and it became the subject he painted more than any other.

The paintings share a world of their own. Figures with the heads of horses, birds and goats stand beside women wrapped in cloth. Harlequin diamonds, oil lamps, bottles, gramophones and crows recur. Grounds are dark and quiet, deep red, indigo or olive, so that each form glows as if lit from inside. In the canvases of the mid-1990s he sometimes wrote a few words across the picture: “She was waiting”, “Nice to meet you”, “Bird, me”.

He left the stories unfinished on purpose. The viewer is meant to step in and complete them, the way one completes a dream on waking.