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) |
