Palayan (पलायन)

Jai Zharotia rarely painted the news. His work lived in dream, myth and mystery. The lockdown changed that. The images of families walking hundreds of kilometres, carrying children and bundles on empty highways, stayed with him.

The Palayan canvases are built in tall panels, each 60 × 80 inches, set side by side. In one, dozens of small figures are scattered across a grey ground, crouching, walking, carrying, cut through by diagonal bands of orange, green and black like roads seen from above. In another, pale figures stand and move in pairs against a deep green, under a sheltering roof. The vocabulary is his late one, flat colour and broken forms, but the subject is real people on a real road.

Palayan shows another side of an artist best known for fantasy: a man who felt the world’s events in his body, and answered with the only means he had.