The artist who explores abstraction in art through text

Artist Jagmohan Bangani, whose solo show "Visual Scriptures" was inaugurated recently and will remain on display till December 24, explores abstraction by using text, words or even a group of words and scripts which we frequently encounter in our daily life.

"Gaining new experiences with experimenting different text forms over the canvas surface is a sole drive to develop my artwork from the beginning phase to the final outcome. I use texts from Sanskrit, Hindi, Punjabi and English languages in my work and I receive different outcome because the text shapes of each language are quite dissimilar to each other," said Bangani, who received his masters degree in painting from England's Winchester School of Art.

He also said that by following this simple practice, the composition that he tries to create evolves into a continuous process of a metaphor. And he does this by using a number of layers of texts.

"I attempt to harness the inner movement and thoughts of life which is inspired by the realm of nature in order to create images from the inner world. The inner strata which I want to hide are overlapped by using different colours for keeping the emotions more securely. Usually I do prefer to have an opaque or translucent layer of colours by merging texts with each other, which certainly shows an idea of dispersion in my work," the artist explained.

But how does one actually go about using colours and lines with texts? Bangani said that for him the use of space, colours and lines varies according to the text.

"The certain use of surface with specific division between the texts and words create an expected space, which is accumulated to structure an individual depth; and therefore, one can easily understand the meaning and connection between the used texts," he maintained.

As an artist, Bangani said, he is always interested in exploring different mediums and techniques. At the beginning of his art career, he was portraying the surroundings, way of living, daily routine works, customs and cultures of folk people from mountain communities. And since he is from Uttarakhand, he was satisfied with his work.

And then he began visiting art galleries, museums, and contemporary art exhibitions. This not only developed his understanding of art but also pushed him ahead to explore his ideas and techniques more creatively.

"I started portraying my own image with creating textures over the canvas surface for a few years. I remember creating texture and using different postures of self image was my first attempt towards an exploration and I was able to obtain the desirable outcomes. But still I was not satisfied and tried to look forward to explore my technique and ideas in more creative approaches," he added.

Bangani's art works are in collections of the Secretariat of Uttarakhand State (Dehradun), Lalit Kala Akademi, the Ford Foundation, Max Mueller Bhavan and Asian Heritage Foundation, among others.

(Saket Suman can be contacted at saket.s@ians.in <mailto:saket.s@ians.in>)

--IANS

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