Colours are a happening of visual observation. Even before learning to read and write, children are introduced to colours around them- seasonal colours; colours in the environment; colours in food; colours of the sea, sky and water. We can't hear taste or feel colour, the only way to recognize colour is to see it and only by seeing colour we can feel it. Vibrant works of Sujata Bajaj tantalize the viewer’s sensory perception and enters one’s mind with the bold use of vivacious colour.
Sujata’s command over the use of powerful colours and lines induces one to be drawn to her non-representational imagery as it transcends the objective world and celebrates the power of colour, line and texture in her works. Her visual elements liberated from the burden of subjectivity create an unexplained mysticism. I first encountered this magic two years ago when I came out of my academic realm to work in the contemporary art market. It was her painting ‘Eclat’ in the collection of an art collector in Delhi where I was working. I didn’t know Sujata or her works but somehow I felt drawn, a strange feeling it was and I was ardently attracted to that painting.
Abstract art has a way of drawing the viewer inwards, to seek beneath the figure of the visible forms an interiority that reflects the painter’s own thought. Illuminating the ‘unmanifested’ Sujata’s work seems a referent deeply rooted in the psyche, anchored in ancient Indian philosophies that address not merely the eternal conflict, but ways of communication between matter and spirit. As an observer, we try and interpret the algebraic play with forms and tonal play with colours as if we can actually see between the lines, longitudinal and latitudinal, the hues, reds and blues but in fact the allusion are a storyteller’s play to try and create a curiosity about the content. Sujata’s coloured palette converse many different stories and the brilliance of her brush and the materiality of her pigment create an extraordinary world pulsating with boundless energy. Sometimes they come out as dramatic emotions ‘the navarasas’, the real drama of life with varied experiences of ups and downs, sometimes more as cosmic and divine energy with a realization of the self and the supreme, sometimes as the lyrical musical nodes of a classical song and sometimes as vibrant echoes of vedas and mantras. Sometimes they seem to me as mere play with colours remembering the childhood and festive frolic in holi and making rangoli and sometimes as a collage of her much loved coloured fabrics. This imbibed affinity for colour may be from her birth city Jaipur with its coloured buildings, cloths and jewelry or her research on tribal art but whatever Sujata’s inspiration, joie de vivre (as Sujata was say it in French) of colour is apparent in her works. When I went to meet Sujata first time, I found her in a room full with colourful fabrics and jewelry all around, it was her friend Kamayni’s boutique and she said ‘whenever I am in Delhi I spend most of the time here just to feel and get pampered by the colours’.
With her roots in East and branches in West, Sujata’s work has a disparate say. Sujata has always said to be born under a lucky star. Born to a Gandhian family with strong cultural roots, the youngest among five siblings with an age gap of twenty- one years with the eldest one, Sujata got a special status, akin to being an only child with multiple parents. She said ‘I was lucky to get freedom and emotional security both together which was rare in India that time’. But this very Indian lady had a special connection to Paris, the place where she not just found her true love but also found her own artistic vocabulary. Though settled in Paris for more then twenty years Sujata’s roots are still as strong as ever; a Sujata who has learned from her mother not to compare but just to take the best out of everything. Besides family members, another figure who played a key role in her life was S.H Raza. He pushed her to pursue further studies in Paris and made her familiar to the city and he was there for her when she needed.
Having worked with several art forms like etching, wood-cut, sculpture, mural, fiber- glass, metal and experimenting with styles like symbolic, figurative, semi abstract to abstract, Sujata’s real language has taken a pure abstract form and she says ‘ My expressions are more clear with lines and colours’. Lately she has been working with acrylic on canvas and mixed-media. In her mixed-media series she makes collages out of paper, silk, bits of rope and burnt cardboard to which she also adds wax, chalk, gouache, ink, everything that her hands or eyes come across. She also uses ancient scripts loaded with positive meaning, as she says, to build a message meant to inflate positive energy all around. If her mixed media takes one beneath the azure vista of tranquil waters, the acrylic series reminds of the frenetic activity of the land and the sky, a chaotic procession of birth, death and procreation. Breaking away from overall tranquility there are occasional escapes into quite another mood. Among the paintings there are compositions in red, magenta, indigo and turquoise, and other that are audaciously yellow.
Sujata’s new body of works will be displayed in gallery Patrice Trigano in Paris, this December. Sujata who believes in minimal display is presenting 12 canvases. The oeuvre of the recent suit of work reinforces the artist’s view of void or shunya imagistically through her own kaleidoscope, brightens the dark void one moment and, at another, fires glow in meditative quietude. Another big event which is keeping her busy and excited these days is a second book documenting 250 works spanning her 25 year career. Published by the Parisian publisher La Différence and written by the art critic Michel Waldberg, this book will be released at the time of the show. An English edition is due to be released in Mumbai and New Delhi next year.
From India - Paris – Norway - Paris, Sujata’s work has engrossed divergent sensibility. The reds, greens, yellows and then the crimsons and mauves or violets, simultaneously evoke memories that seem to be inextricably linked with her life lined in different geographies, distinct locations and amidst assorted culture.
