A retrospective show of works entitled ‘Parallels that Meet’ by Jyoti Bhatt, spanning more than five decades including paintings, prints (etchings and screen printings) and photographs was held recently at the Delhi Art Gallery.

Bhatt actually began as a painter and print-maker in the1950s, but by the seventies, the desire to photograph and document India’s vanishing culture had already lured him. Bhatt says, “I have photographed everything from intricately carved doors to floors, pots, pans, walls, houses that is part of our folk art in rural India. My camera replaced by sketch back.”

Since the 70s, Bhatt has been inspired by the colourful stylised motifs of cross-stitch embroidery, rangoli motifs and the use of traditional calligraphic ideograms from his native Saurashtra. Bhatt’s body of work breaks down all established barriers between art and craft, fine and popular, urban and rural, decorative and symbolic forms of art.

The common every day object reinvests itself in a realm of fantasy, where artist’s wild imagination creates collages and cut-outs in a completely new concept. Although, Bhatt is known for his mastery over different mediums, his fascination for something new has resulted in being at the forefront of the technical vanguard of modernism in India. Finally his repertoire of images spills across mediums, where his graphic prints resembles his photographs or one hand coloured in a manner akin to his paintings.

Even in his photographs, he employs the technique of collage, where he incorporates drawings coloured by hand after being chemically maneuvered.

Teaming with signs and symbols in what can be described as decorative-figurative-narrative, Bhatt’s works are full of sound and movements and the forms, pattern and gestures speak of multiple human relationships and an autobiographical experience while being placed in the longer contexts of a socio-political and cultural reality.  
If we look at the painting entitled ‘A B Zee of my India’, the saturated visual field seems to be filled with the native rendering of the world lost after childhood.

Quite in the genre of children’s popular picture looks where simply drawn objects/figures in bold colours are illustrated for recall and retention, Jyoti Bhatt mainly uses cryptic motifs and personalized icons to create the innocent effect.

 Images from art history, hoardings of commercial cinema, seductive imagery from blue film posters, pop-kitschy ones from marriage festoons lightings with the leaf crimson heart always shown in a flutter are resourced from Bhatt’s vivid memory.

Bhatt is best known for his mastery in print-making, especially integrated and screen  printing and his photographs document visual cultures from rural India that are fast eroding in times of rapid urbanization. Bhatt was inspired initially by his mentor/artist K G Subramanian, travelled extensively into the remote interiors of many villages over in different regions in India to document the living traditions of the rural tribes and the arts that were especially made by women.   

This major retrospective showcased works not from his early phase but also from his Italy and New York scholarship period and after.

Bhatt’s style in painting moved from his abstract texturised terrains to a densely-pictured world where figured, negated and animal imagery collided, captured on crisp linen drawings into the manner of motifs floating in richly-coloured spaces. Above all, Bhatt’s art is averse to pretence, to false claims and categories of convenience and playfully satirical and witty in presenting troubling issues of identity and representation that so haunted the artists who began their career in the early decades of post-independent India. 

Known for audacious twists and turns in his work, the artist demonstrated his urge to take risks and this is what separates him from his contemporaries and make him a significant figure of our times.