Cut and Thrust of Expression

At Triveni, Zharotia’s two years’ labour calls on not just his love for duality and the formless, but also poetry, one that can be hauled, stretched and thrown in space and brought back. “Do you know Kumar Gandharva? I love this form of music. There is a note that is thrown up in space. It melts down. It’s a combination of silence and sound. Similarly, my images become like sound. They dilute in space, get merged with space,” he says.

It was all conceived in London, where his son lives, whom he visits six months a year. Away from the chaos of Delhi, or even that of the art world, Zharotia brings his inner creative monologues to the canvas, devoid of impressions from external world. “After my retirement from College of Art, I thought that whatever is happening in Indian art is like picture making. It has become like a decoration. Expression mein cheed phaad hota hai. They are abstract in nature. Abstraction is not decoration. They are emotional actions. Abstraction has an imaginative power. My works are like that,” he says.

The artist’s vocabulary appear in distortions (“emotional distortions,” he adds), a metaphysical visual that toggles between the real and the abstract. “You also see that colouring, in my works, is not physical. And you will see allusions to objects, rather than direct references,” he says.

The exhibition is on till April 11