Vidhyasagar Upadhyay's Songs without Words

In understanding the creative efforts of a talented painters, his other achievements are sometimes a hindrance rather then a help. For Instance, Upadhyay you will come to know, is a PhD in Fine Arts and the head of the department of painting in one of the best Art institutions of the country and that he has participated in scores of National and International exhibitions both at home and abroad and held umpteen numbers of solo expositions in major cities of India. It is worth remembering that events of the artist's life are not that important in understanding his work. The work of the artist is the ultimate text, and happening in his life can be compared to footnotes. While writing a book on the artist the author may try to weave intricate design from the events of the artist's life and show their impact on his works. Strangely enough other writers trying to use the same material will arrive at different conclusions. Ultimately the viewers will have to depend and fall back on the artist's work. The text is more important than the commentary and exegesis.

Like most artists, Upadhayay's paintings in the formative stage was representational. As the years went by and he developed, his work began to shed figurative excesses and to build a compact whole in high-tension colour fields. In the present series he has totally banished all vestiges of figure paintings. He has reached a stage where he is fully independent as he does not have to use illustrative jottings, suggest a narrative through the visuals or implant some details from myth for the purpose of luring the viewers. Like great non-figurative painters from Wassily Kandinsky, Piet Mondrian, Jackson Pollock to Gastan Bertrand, he has also used abstraction in painting as it is used in music.

By the time Upadhyay got involved in abstraction several art movements like Pop, Op, Conceptual Art and the rest of the shooting match had displaced American Abstract Expressionism. The late 20th and early 21st century art was moving beyond the realm of modernism and in to that of post-modernism. Upadhyay's paintings are informed of the later day trends. His abstractions reach out and explore the extreme limits of non-figuration. From the search for the chaos of the inner-self he has moved into the vast expanse of outer space and as it were, created a visual of the unified field theory. This has made him move away from square and rectangular compositional compact to circular ones. Artist have rarely used circular composition but in his hand they become terrestrial to supra terrestrial. It seems, he prefers a variety of interpretation of his work as he has layered them with variation of meaning. Most of this series of paintings, with the rare exception of one which is in acrylic, are in mixed media. He has executed them with dry pastel, graphite, watercolour and acrylic paints. His work radiates luminosity for this reason. Viewers may see them abstract landscapes in the format of a circle. Other in space, some as far as millions of light years away. This inter-steller obsession makes his works postmodern. He continues from where European and later American abstractionists left off.

Upadhyay hints that we are not earth earthy but made of cosmic stuff and substance. He is steeped in the ethos and culture of his native Rajsathan. Folklore and art and crafts, the colours of textile and varied landscape of the region influenced him, as well as the hymns of Mira Bai. The arid desert landscapes and lakes, forts and scanty vegetation and the ambience of medieval atmosphere underneath the contemporary veneer have all cast a shadow on him.

Above all, the tradition of Rajput miniature and Jaipuri fresco have inspired him. You might remember that Kandinsky's paintings indicate the impact of Russian icons particularly that of Rublyev's, and the mystic elements of the Russian Orthodox Church. Upadhyay's paintings integrate his heritage in a similar way. His roots go deep but his branches spread into the open blue sky.

SANDIP SARKAR (Art Historian and Critic)

Upadyay is poetic in his rock like formation. One wonders if, at the back of the painters mind is the poetic landscape of his own distant miniature tradition.........He must be considred one of the most inventive.

Times Of India, Bombay

Upadyay is one may say, on exclisive territory; for his approch to art is not derivative but characterised by originality and imagination. There is a great deal of strength and substance in his composition.

Evening News of India, Bombay

The delibrate surender of larger painterly resources is in consensus with his aesthetic intention. He tries to seize the elemental quality of the landscape, the bareness of earth and sky, which yet is the womb where life sprout mysteriously.

The Hindustan Times