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Jai Zharotia

Jai Zharotia is an Indian artist born in 1945 who pursued art after being exposed to it through his family. He received diplomas in art and fine arts and later became a lecturer to teach painting. As an artist-teacher, he encouraged creative expression over dogma. While known as a painter, he also excelled in printmaking. Teaching provided stability while he pursued personal artistic goals reflecting emotion and subjective experiences. His art experiments with abstraction, figuration, and defying conventions to present new perspectives.

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145 views5 pages

Jai Zharotia

Jai Zharotia is an Indian artist born in 1945 who pursued art after being exposed to it through his family. He received diplomas in art and fine arts and later became a lecturer to teach painting. As an artist-teacher, he encouraged creative expression over dogma. While known as a painter, he also excelled in printmaking. Teaching provided stability while he pursued personal artistic goals reflecting emotion and subjective experiences. His art experiments with abstraction, figuration, and defying conventions to present new perspectives.

Uploaded by

Ajay Zharotia
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Press Release:

Artist’s Biographical Sketch

Jai Zharotia was born in New Delhi in 1945, in a


humble craftsman family that lived life with
simplicity. A self driven struggle and sensitive nature
pushed him towards literary and artistic pursuits. His
evolution as an artist was a gradual process after he
trained himself in the basics of paintings and
acquired a Diploma in Art. To be certain about his
vocational choice, he reinforced his involvement by
studying for another Diploma in Fine Arts. The next
big thing for him was to become a teacher and he
joined the College of Art, Delhi as a lecturer in
Painting, in the year 1974. As an artists-teacher he
was relaxed and least dogmatic in his teaching of Art,
wanting students to seek creatively by themselves.
His ability to demonstrate various art techniques with
equal extremely beneficial for his students. His own
works were never confined to a single technique or
theme and he was always working in his studio at the
college for students to gain experience.

Jai also organized many silk-screen Printing and


Graphic workshop in the college and for NGOs such
as Udyan Care and Concern India Foundation.
Though essentially a painter, Jai has been renowned
for his skills in printmaking and he has been a
significant participant of national and international
exhibition on prints. A man committed to his calling,
for Jai, art was not a means to earn a livelihood. He
was never sure that his works that reflect a subjective
world and personal emotional states would easily be
consumed by his viewers. Teaching was in fact his
way of a stable income while he pained what he
wished to paint. His journey is an artist who
struggled to stay above the poverty line and strived
for recognitions and artistic success has been
extraordinary. He remained rooted in his tradition and
culture while he experimented with a modernist
approach to art making.

A believer in destiny, for Jai, his life has been shaped


by forces that were beyond his control. His works
celebrate his aspirations, dreams and his empathies of
the world.

An artist who trespasses established formal and


aesthetic categories to deviate from the beaten path,
invariably presents an emerging viewing experience.
Walking the precarious edge between abstraction and
figuration and defying the fixations and European
Modernism, Jai Zharotia chases the poetic and
fantastic realm in his art, drawing inspiration from
both miniatures and select modern art movements.
As Jai spills out an imaginative representation of life,
his minimal yet marvelous watercolours overthrow
our sense of the familiar, sabotaging our tamed/
habitual ways of seeing the world. Within a nebulous
ground, characters emerge is an illumined zone of
consciousness, awakened by their latent powers.

The female gymnast sparked Jai’s imagination as one


such character that makes us marvel at the elasticity
of the mind and body, as she turns the impossible in
to possible and transforms in to an unbelievable
spectacle. Moved by the stunning feats of stretching,
arching and effortless controlling to transform in to
an endless ring in space, Jai pained her as an
electrifying image, radiating energy and light. Her
boneless linear a mature in its kinetic swirls was
abstracted as if in a ‘flash of lightning’—her swift
lights off the ground were caught in mid-air. Jai’s
relentless articulation of her image perhaps signifies
his secrete desires for conquest, but more than that, it
brings him closer to the philosophical truth of life
summed up in the very ‘act of balancing’. Life is a
precarious slope or a trapeze act where danger and
fear are constant shadows, reminders of the
existential trap that is difficult to evade.
Luqman Ali is another character that is Jai is
persistently drawn to. Fictitious and yet so real,
Luqman was invented by the poet Soumitra Mohan
as a character incessantly in search of himself. By
way of fantasy, Luqman attempts to overcome
childhood fears, his inadequacies and contradictions.
Luqman is hero and villain, active and passive, with
positive and negative shades, challenged by
mysterious forces and unknown enemies. Often
hounded by his own shadow and apparition, he tries
but fails to cut his desire with a sword or protect his
moral life through sheer physical power. A trickster
of sorts, a dreamer at times, Luqman for Jai
represents the duality of life, the friction between
good and evil, escapes and surrender.

The puppeteer who juggles makes and identifies with


equal ease is another favorite of the artist. He puts the
real world on trial, masking and unmasking identities,
subjugating the puppets to his will. Games of
manipulation and illusion are not merely performed
in the circus ring but also played out in social and
political situations. For Jai the puppeteer, juggler and
the clown represent the interface of the comic and
tragic forces that co-exist in our daily life.

But the most enduring of Jai’s themes are located in


the realm of dream and mystery. Meaning becomes
fuzzier as Jai confounds reality, merging the real and
the absurd, so that ordinary experience inherits
improbable conclusions. This composition is often
left suspended with miscarried thoughts and partial
suggestions, allowing the viewers to either connect,
decipher or resolve the incomplete riddles. Choosing
a medium that helps submerge his dreamy states in
soft watery blurs and gestures, he equally adapts it to
paint precise forms creatively patterned and sectioned
to flout the rules of tonal build-ups and illusionist
representation. The birds and bulls are final examples
of this pictorial style. A single tree when examined
closely reveals a human arm feeding fruits to a
human head appearing on the trunk. In another,
painterly daubs that follow free hand gestures build
up the body of the (t) horny monster like creature,
overpowering the seated woman.

The charm of the world of fantasy is indeed seductive


as it edits life for pleasure and self-gratification.

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