Artists- Life and works

Jeram Patel

“By burning wood, I am making an attack on it…nobody can create anything, the only thing that one can do is to destroy things. By the way of destroying or destruction I want to forget something.”

― Jeram Patel

Jeram Patel was one of several artists who transformed Indian art in the late 1950s and ‘60s by developing a new visual identity and a new method of abstraction.

Jeram Patel was born in Sojitra in the Kaira district of Gujarat in 1930. Between 1950 and 55 he studied drawing and painting at the Sir JJ School of Art in Mumbai and for two years until 1959 he studied printing and advertising design at the Central School of Arts and Craft in London. He received several national awards and was appointed professor and then dean of the faculty in 1976. He had also represented India at various international festivals.

During the 1960s, he introduced a new medium that burnt wood with a blowtorch and engraving amorphous shapes on it, often against a monochrome background of bold colors, the method he learned in Japan and later pioneered in India. His work of the 1950s and ’60s, expresses a sense of pain that recalls European paintings of the same period by artists such as Alberto Burri and Antoni Tapies, as well as Japanese Gutai, Ku-lim Kim in South Korea and the Egyptian artist Hamed Abdalla, who also used blowtorch method for a series he created in Copenhagen in the early 1960s.

His other innovative styles included abstraction with saturated, almost foating shapes of black ink on paper or his distinctive and textured use of paint, particularly bold black strokes.

The bends, curves, closures and enclosures and the opaque and transparent areas of his images, create movement. Therefore, every single drawing invites us to think about it and have a dialogue with it, instead of trying to decode it. They are a state of things in themselves that we must interpret, live and experience.

He makes the images real in themselves that the viewer has their own intellectual and visual perceptions and concerns about. But this does not mean that his images are absolutely free of context, violence and problems are also refected in his works.

In his works, there is nothing it’s a dark black patch, but underneath there are forms, it resembles you are uncovering hidden forms which are underneath a dark black patch.

So somewhere his entire process of life was to erase things (memories), he dealt with his memories working like that and erasing those memories. So it was dealing with his own memories, through surroundings and his life, as there are psychological interpretations, perceptions, characters and images that arise from the memories. He would just go into his world of memories, work on it and close it by putting black color on it. That was his efort in his paintings and so very lately there was color in his paintings. Earlier it was all black and monochromatic, and then there was color appearing.

It would narrate a story, by presenting a essence of his experience, so that it later makes an open, experiential ending.

DESIGN PROCESS, WORKS

Fig 2.1 Untitled Blowtorch and enamel paint on wood 24 x 23.75”

Fig 2.2 Untitled Ink on paper, 21 x 26.25”

In Jeram Patel's paintings, large strokes can be seen on the canvas, when viewed from a distance, it seems as if we are not experiencing a painting, but a drama. We can almost feel the idea of violence that it was aimed at, that is hidden under a calm exterior. When you look at his fearsome art, it feels like he's depicting that on canvas and wood. He treated wood like a being.

Sometimes just a hint of color hidden beneath the monochrome shows his interest with the hidden. And this unseen thing is often not a pleasant place. He used the blowtorch as a brush on the wooden body, throughout the act it seemed as if “his hand was groping the surface of the wood with a fnger of fre.” The ritual lasted more than an hour. Burnt enough, the wood, clean of its outer layer, turned into a dark beauty.

Fig 2.3 Untitled Wood burnt with a blowtorch, 1963 Fig 2.4 Untitled Blowtorch & laminated wood, 23.7” x 23.7”

Fig 2.5 Untitled Oil on masonite board Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, 1961

Fig 2.6 Untitled Ink on paper, 11.70 x 16.20”

At frst glance, paintings have just abstract shapes, with the color black for space and signifcance. A reality which cannot be seen or felt but is defnitely there. Interpretation was open-ended. Our experience can allow us to relate to shapes and geometry. His blowtorch experiments are just a conversation, one that he probably wanted the people to have. He drew on paper, everything he saw around him and then he would just paint them in pieces on paper. Then he used the entire black color on it and created that cloud and then connected it through this painting.

His other preferred methods included Chinese ink and crow quill. Hospital Series, one of his rare earlier works done in crow quill, includes a series of images portraying pain and mortality in graphic details such as an injected needle piercing the skin and the decay and the laceration of the skin, death, disease and despair. They were painful and sometimes even disturbing.

Fig 2.7 Untitled Blowtorch, burnt wood and paint on wood 24” x 24”

Fig 2.8 Hospital series (Crow quill & ink on handmade paper pasted on)

TIMELINE OF JERAM PATEL’S WORK

KAZIMIR MALEVICH

“By “Suprematism” I mean the supremacy of pure feeling in creative art. To the Suprematist the visual phenomena of the objective world are, in themselves, meaningless; the signifcant thing is feeling.”

― Kazimir Malevich

Kazimir Severinovich Malevich was a Russian Avant garde artist and art theorist. He was a pioneer of geometric abstract art and the originator of the Suprematist movement and founder of the Suprematist school of abstract painting. He was born on February 23, 1878, near Kiev Governorate of Russian Empire. From 1904 to 1910 he studied at the Kiev Art School, the Stroganov School in Moscow and the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture, where artists such as Leonid Pasternak and Konstantin Korovin taught him Impressionist and Post-Impressionist techniques of painting.

He worked in various styles, quickly assimilating the movements of Impressionism, Fauvism and Cubism. Gradually, he simplifed his style and developed an approach using keywords that consist of pure geometric shapes and their relationships to one another against minimal fundamentals. His Black Square (1915), a black square on white, represented the most absolute abstract pointing ever created so far and drew an uncrossable line between old and new art.

DESIGN PROCESS, WORKS

He started his life as an artist painting Russian landscapes, farming and religious scenes. He lived during the First World War and the Russian Revolution. He invented an art style called Suprematism, a visual language with simple shapes and colors. He used squares, circles and rectangles and only a few colors to create his artwork. It was about seeing and feeling art in a new way. It is a very geometric style of 20th century abstract painting, developed by him. It refers to an art based on the supremacy of “pure artistic feeling” rather than the representation of objects.

In his earlier paintings he presented geometric forms in a limited color palette, sometimes just black, on a white background. He later introduced a wider range of colors as well as triangles, circles and curved shapes.

The white background is of the main importance in his Suprematist works. A restorer from the Conservation Center in Dusseldorf observed, “The touch of the brush is brief and irregular, heavily coated and applied in a cruciform manner.”

For him the most important elements in the composition of the picture were color and texture. He believed they are the essence of the painting, but this has always been destroyed by the subject.

He also stated, “Cubism, besides its constructive, architectonic and philosophic content, had various forms of surface treatment.” It was visible in his cubo-futuristic paintings, relief surfaces, enameled, rough, lacquered and matte.

He used pigments with diferent opacity to diferentiate planes as he wanted to achieve a texture diferentiation with the same color.

Fig 2.9 The Black Square: the zero of form Oil on canvas, 1915

Fig 2.10 Red Square (A Peasant Woman in Two Dimensions) Oil on canvas, 1915

In 1913, he made his frst suprematist composition, a pencil drawing of a black square on a white background. The composition is simply composed of a black square on a white background. Although the painting seems quite simple, it shows its fneness through the brushstrokes and colors under the cracked black surface. The cracks were seen due to his practice of painting on the surface of the works before they are completely dry. For him, the white area represented nothing, as the black square represented feelings that could only be gained through observation without reason. Without the use of color or shading, the square moves beyond a sense of space with its fatness. The black and white in this composition, can mean the presence from absence.

By reducing painting to a simple shape, he removed all the things that art was always about (like animals, food, people, landscapes). He was interested in Eastern philosophy and used it as a base.

Fig 2.11 Supremus No. 58 Oil on canvas, 1916

Fig 2.12 White on white Oil on canvas, 1917 31.26” x 31.26”

Fig 2.13 Suprematism Oil on canvas, 1915

Fig 2.14 Suprematism, Self-Portrait in Two Dimensions Oil on canvas, 1915

The three levels of Suprematism were described by Malevich as black, colored and white. The Eight Red Rectangles is an example of the second, more dynamic phase in which primary colors were used. The composition is somewhat not clearly understandable, while on the one hand the rectangles can be read as foating in space, as if they were suspended on the wall, they can also be read as objects seen from above. The uneven spacing and slight tilt of the compared shapes in Eight Red Rectangles, as well as the subtly diferent tones of red, flled the composition with energy and enabled Malevich to experiment with his concept of infnite space.

But the composition has something fascinating about the dull, almost assertive simplicity of his work. Here paintings are cleared to its most basic elements, to the simplest of all forms and colors. It is hard to imagine an artwork being so completely isolated from the outside world of everyday experience.

Fig 2.15 Suprematist Composition, with 8 rectangles Oil on canvas, 1915

Fig 2.16 Painterly Masses in Motion, Oil on canvas, 1915

Fig 2.17 Suprematist Composition 1915

Fig 2.18 Suprematism Museum of Art, Krasnodar 1916

EARLY INFLUENCES AND INSPIRATION

In Malevich’s paintings, traces and inspirations of the Avant garde poetry and literary criticism can be seen. Words and art then, enabled him to create a new, strange and fresh perspective of the world. He was very interested in the rules of language. Believing that there are only fne links between words and the objects they denote and from this, it inspired him to see the possibilities of completely abstract art and led him to search for the least difcult necessary elements of art. He wanted to completely remove the real world for the viewer to look at the world instead through the mystical experience evoked by abstract art. In addition he was inspired by Russian folk art and the traditions of the Russian Orthodox Church. It was more about the cultural context. Both Futurism and Cubism infuenced the Suprematism in Russia. Suprematism can be seen as the logical extension of Futurism's interest in movement and Cubism's reduced forms and diferent perspectives. The word Suprematism was originated to describe a movement that would be superior to all art of the past and would lead to the supremacy of pure feelings and perception in the visual arts.

Simple motifs such as square, circle and cross were used that connected the shape and the fat surface of the canvas. Texture was also an important quality to work with. For him, the images of the objective world were meaningless in themselves, the feeling was important. The compositions had a specifc sense of depth due to the variety of shapes, sizes and angles depicted. The shapes thus appeared to be moving in space.

He painted some of his subjects following Leonardo’s advice which stated that if a transparent color is placed over another, a new color is formed. There are many such examples covering red or violet areas with thin, transparent layers of black.

TIMELINE OF KAZIMIR MALEVICH’S WORK

2.3 INFERENCE

Jeram Patel’s work consisted of a dark black patch, but underneath there were forms, it resembles you are uncovering hidden forms which are underneath a dark black patch. His methods included abstraction using saturated, almost foating shapes of black ink on paper or textured use of paint, especially bold black strokes. It would narrate a story, by presenting a essence of his experience, so that it later makes an open, experiential ending. Everything he expressed was in the shades of monochrome. Very lately there was color in his paintings. There was movement in the paintings even without forms. Masses appear to haul inwards on a clear path. The images had no focal points. It is like looking at the whole surface at the same time, any part seems a possible focal point.

Kazimir Malevich’s paintings consisted of squares, circles and rectangles and only a few colors. He depicted space without a perspective or up and down. He developed a curiosity in space. His connection with aviation made him see gravity as an attractive force in all directions through space. As a result, he would invert and change the direction of painting hanging at diferent exhibitions. He believed world is much more simple and logical. He developed a sense of movement not through brushstrokes but through the closeness and irregularity of fat shapes, which were positioned diagonally rather than along a vertical or horizontal axis. Thus the composition had a specifc sense of depth. His style of painting caused confusion.