Jeram Patel won't suffer fools, or colour, gladly, he tells Kishore Singh
Pare down an artist to his essentials and you’re left with very little: an idea, some tools, colour. The articulation of this is the sum of their work, but often artists speak more volubly than their canvases, something you can’t accuse Baroda-based Jeram Patel of. Jeram Bhai, at 78, is still startlingly spare in his oratory, just as he is sparse in his work, keening in on the idea so sharply, nothing else matters.
Known primarily for his ink drawings in a mostly small format, Patel was one of the earliest Indian artists to work in a sculptural mode when, on his return from Japan, in the sixties, he created a few works in burnt wood. But this was long before artists could experiment freely and still hope to sell, so he went back to his drawings to explore space on a blank sheet of paper, almost etching-like in their quality and detail — forms that exploded within their free-flowing but tightly reigned-in lines. “I constantly thought of forms,” he says, “whether they were natural forms or manmade forms.”
Nor was he worried about people’s reactions. “Creation for me was not based on whether people wanted to see the works or not, whether they enjoyed them or not, whether they wanted to buy them or not.” No wonder his essential oeuvre has never wavered, and it is easy to trace his works along a linear trajectory from the sixties right up to now. But he did agree, with some persuasion from his friends, to return to that abandoned past, when he agreed to work with burnt wood once more, following a gap of four decades.
At a factory belonging to art collector and promoter Asit Shah, Patel returned to his burnt wood sculptural forms, though he insists that “Some may call these sculptures, but not me. An image is a painting — and these are paintings.” But paintings or sculpture or both, they are joyfully experimental, less stern, almost playful, though as controlled as Patel has ever been over his medium.
Essentially, they consist of plywood sheets that have been pasted together to make board, or layered wood. These blocks of wood he hands over to a carpenter to gouge and structure into the shapes he has decided on, opening up the layers like the rings of a tree, or the minerals and rocks of a mountainside. He then burns some or all of it, to create distinctive colours and contrasts, the carbon residue brushed away with a steel brush and then sandpapered to reveal his playful forms.
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“I think,” he says thoughtfully, “a lot.” What he also does, almost obsessively, is to keep returning to his works. “I need to keep looking at them,” not so much in admiration as critically. “It warns the painter what to do and what not to do,” he explains.
While wood — burnt or raw — might not be new to him, steel is a new material, used as the topmost layer and for casing. “I chose steel,” he reasons, “because when it is put up in a gallery, it works like a mirror, you see reflections in it — I enjoy that — you see movements…” And colour, I remind him, steel reflects colour. “Colour,” he says severely, “has no value other than being decorative. It’s not,” he adds on prodding, “that I don’t like colour.” But nature, I remind him, has colour. “Then why not look at nature,” he snaps, “why look at a painting?”
Why indeed?
