Sajal Sarkar is essentially a figurative artist, employing human body as a dominant trope of his artistic expression to glance at the economic inequalities, social injustices and political muscle flexing that glare in the face of people who remain powerless because of their lack of opportunities in life and the resultant exploitation that results. His artistic expressions explore the existentialist angst caught in the vortex of socio-politico- economic realities, engaging him intensely through these stimuli with his passionate responses. He is not an activist artist so to speak, but these exegeses sensitively articulate his emotions and feelings. Through disjunction of body parts, Sajal communicates his ‘being' which itself is a radical uncertainty. The emotions though not apparent, undergird his works with potency. His creative energies are foregrounded in creating a language that connects his internal and external worlds. He articulates his visual vocabulary through conceptual strategies and human body to explore notions of belonging, loss and identity. And what lends poignancy to his work is that the body symbolizes it projected through his dynamic technique. The semantics of his philosophy manifest through the fragmented ‘body' which becomes the site for realization and precipitation of his feelings and emotions as well to carry the social message. It is also an alterity that Sajal explores stepping outside of himself to questioningly look at himself as an outsider.
An intense self-awareness leads Sajal to authenticate his painted expressions by reference to his personal experiences, which through the process of critical time allows him to constitute a personal history. In this context says Sajal, “Celebration is somewhat rare. It is failure that attracts me more than success. This might have something to do with my experiences of life around me, while I was at an impressionable age.” Through compositional artistry, Sajal reflects a duality that is ever present in life. That is of joys and sorrows, love and pain, success and failures, angst and relief, separation and union, loss and gain.
Born and brought up in Kolkata, a singular influence in his early life was his mother who encouraged his grafitti on the walls at home and also sent him to an art school. He later joined and graduated in painting from the Government College of Art and Craft, Kolkata in1989. After his formal training Sajal extended his academic domain by studying and exploring different media that would provide a springboard for experimenting and innovating not only techniques but also concepts. Consequently he pursued a post graduate diploma in Print making in 1993 at the faculty of Fine Arts, M.S. University Baroda. His experimentations here were at the level of form, theme and medium.
The Dominant Human Form
If Sajal has arrived at his visual language, then the journey has been long and arduous. He began his career with photorealistic style that evoked a surreal ambient. But his sojourn at Baroda changed this completely. Here he engaged with diverse media as printmaking, photography, print and digital medium etc. that facilitated in articulating his concepts boldly and daringly. The visual technologies offered Sajal a space; creating a broad base to pitch his artistic expression, that disintegrated his earlier realism and fragmented his human body. The latter eventually became a vehicle to convey his pains, sorrows, joys and fulfillment. The engagement with the human male form continues to be privileged in his works, finding a place even in cityscapes inspired from Richard Este, with figuration stimulated by Lucian Freud or David Hockney and portraits of Chuck Close. These influences remain rich and perceptible in Sajal's oeuvre.
His enduring engagement with the human form beginnings with early nudes was not an attempt to make his expressions visually titillating with sexual or erotic overtones. As a matter of fact he mediated with the human body to express the strength of masculine tension. "My male figures are somewhat autobiographical and deal with basic human emotions like fear, pain and agony. I always find facial expressions a potent vehicle to convey thoughts and emotions,” says the artist. . Sajal works at the volatile side of the mind/body connection. It is the strength of his works either fragmented or single figure that can both surprise and startle while eliciting a strongly sympathetic response in the viewer.
The male nude constitutes Sajal's lexicon, a protagonist that carries the weight of socio-economic burden manifested in the lives of less opportune population. It is not a residue of his academic pedantry, rather a compulsion which pushes him to interface with male body in the spirit of expressing and giving form to all his experiences good or not so good. The body is well proportioned aspiring in its simulation to classical statuary. The fluidity with which the protagonists move in his works is all committed from memory, truly no easy task. Through the physicality of the human body Sajal brings to bear upon it the weight of his unconscious, attempting transcendence to the realm of the pure spirit. This is his ultimate aspiration from material to spiritual, physical to abstract, emotional to philosophical intellectual to psychological. The duality remains in the artists work at all levels.
Fragmentation
The process of development in Sajal's visual language was through fracturing/fragmenting of body parts, which speak eloquently of fragility associated with life and also the experiences of the artist. Thus through emphasis on certain body parts Sajal renders large canvases with portraits of ear, foot, entwined hands or torso that simultaneously provoke and invite by their sheer super realism or through gestural brush strokes loaded with optimistic colours as pinks, blues, yellows, browns and greys offering simultaneously a duality of perception and emotions.
The disjunction of form and thought through emotions as loss, identity or displacement is artistically formatted by Sajal through his concept of duality in the compositional layout. Juxtaposing two techniques namely hatching with oil bar pastels and painting [Face Off] within the same frame, Sajal is declaring visually through metaphors feelings of the “sense of loss” or “exploitation” or “identity”. He addresses the question of identity by foregrounding the notion of ‘self' within a milieu that is slowly witnessing the erosion of authorship or individuality, in which the society or culture constructs the individual whether an artist, performer, littérateur et al. Sajal evokes those moments of contemporary living where these emotions becomes evident in every dimension of existence.
Through his visual metaphors Sajal declares his vocabulary and through his technique he liberates his psychic energy. Trained in painting as well printmaking, he fluidly and with great felicity facilitates in creating the desired effects. The modulations of forms with light and dark tones rendered with superb draftsmanship makes for a strong case of his art messaging ideas with clarity. The strength of his works is clarified in his skill of the craft of picture making, which underpins and makes it visually potent. His painted areas are strongly reminiscent of printmaking techniques. The artist mediating through techniques is exploring his individuality to confirm that there is loss of the neither, i.e. his painting and rendering skills; negotiating the noumenal space to declare his authorship powerfully and willfully.
Sajal's works are self reflexive i.e. they remain symbolic acts of artists psyche as obvious in the fragmented body parts, imparting a creative integrity to his works. The artist has literally fetishized his body, professing, “Confessions takes place within myself.” One sees here a fragmented world and that is our lived reality, where we feel a sense of lack or unfulfilled desires because the connectivity with social or familial or cultural environment is ruptured or disrupted. It is this disjunctural space where the loss is posited. The loss that Sajal talks about concerns engagement with life, in terms of relationships, communication, intellectual depth, feelings, emotions, perceptions, sensations. Every nuance of life is now subjected to scrutiny denying the individual his/her private space. The loss here implicates a loss of boundary between public and private persons, the space being usurped by electronic media, virtual reality, tele messaging and other modes.
“I do take references from the media and even manipulate these on the computer, but the 'painting' aspect is something that remains very important. Here realism is not strictly 'photo- realistic', but perhaps a personalized take on the mediated reality that allows the hand to have the final say over mechanical devices." This progression alters the visual form from a realistic photographic image to one of intensity and passion.
In the present series of works Sajal has moved beyond his explicit duality to focus only on the body either torso, hands, face, legs, foot etc. The concept imminently remains the same evoking social as well economic asymmetries. He extends this to embrace the globalized world where absolute power plays continue to wound humanity [Wounds of Democracy] in the name of progress and development. Sajal through his works attempts to sensitize the viewer to these glaring issues. He does not strike a sermonizing posture, rather he is pointedly making reference to ‘power' and ‘power positions', which positively channalized can effect transformation and change.
Sajal's work seems to be an analysis of the psyche. The works though appearing simplistic carries layers of complexity of meaning. But then our lived reality reflects the same temper, and continues to remain complex, ambivalent and paradoxical. He illustrates the subtle connections between the naked body and nature, the natural person and our universe. Art for him remains an open ended experience with infinite possibilities, inviting with pride and dignity, the viewer to look upon the body with total acceptance and reverence.
The body fragments that Sajal interfaces is a postmodern reality where the disintegration of the bodily structure is reflective of fragility and profanity. The fragmentary body mirrors the critical standpoint towards the artistic representation of the body which, throughout history, reflects the longing for a perfect, ideal form. The phenomenon of the fragmentary body, however, has always been deeply inherent in the production of ideal images: every production of the ideal image results in dismemberment. The body can never be depicted as a perfect whole; quite the contrary, it is always present as a fragment only.
(Ms. Ashrafi S. Bhagat M.A., M.Phil, Ph. D. is an Art Historian and an Art Critic. She heads the Department of Fine Arts, Stella Maris College , Chennai. She writes on modern and contemporary art in newspapers, magazines and journals.)
(Courtesy: Ashrafi S. Bhagat and Sajal Sarkar) |
