Consciousness is layered, to which access is both problematic and rewarding. Though Satre and Kierkegaard stress on the primacy of the individual experience over institutional rubric, this itself is subjective to the social and cultural ethos of societies and their people. And though it is largely this institutional rubric that reduces the large-scale richness of the pictorial, to hold it within archetypal dimensions, there are those who manage to steer clear of the stereotypes thus generated. Rajesh Baderia is one such practitioner of painting, whose quest in art has always been spiritual in its thrust.

Most artistic works of significance proceed from acts of intuition felt by prioritisation of the pursuit of seeking one’s personal truth, rather than from any great intellectual idea or some marvellous imagination. Talking specifically about the abstract in art, one may say that in the main, the ideologies of abstraction are psychological, personal and largely apolitical, its relevant aesthetic value being that of self-expression, with its pictorial exposition functioning to make public the realm of primal, non-conventional meanings hidden within the artistic psyche.

 Abstraction, in the Indian mind is not necessarily a reduction or a simplification of the materially visible object or atmosphere. The Indian way is rather to get through to a intuitive or revelatory impression or by a meditative practice dwell on the whole creation of things-- dhyana in the technical Indian term, to a spiritual meaning and atmosphere, make ourselves one with it as completely as possible, and then and only then allow the spiritual meaning and value of creation come out with a complete and revealing force. In Indian culture it is the spirit that carries the form within itself, as against western norms wherein it is the form that carries whatever there may be of the spirit.

 Against this backdrop, it then becomes essential to understand that the Indian artist looks upon the world not solely with the physical eye, conditioned as it tends to be by reason and aesthetic imagination, but as per his philosophy makes the physical seeing of things a passage to the opening of the inner spiritual eye and a moved communion in the soul. The making and viewing of this, Baderia’s current body of works, too, then is governed by this principle, making abstraction to be looked upon as the essence of being, feeling and sensing, and not as a mere simplification of the visible. If one were to stress the formal concreteness of abstract work in addition to the factors of its creation, this time round one would find Rajesh Baderia excel in both these respects within his current series, OMNIPRESENCE.

 Over the years Baderia’s pictorial language has been characterised by sparse and intermittent deployment of recognisable imagery, more often than not by way of the human form, such as a young boy reaching out for the sky, or perhaps a swan soaring in flight. In the present body of works, however, he seems to have devoted himself largely to a purely non-mimetic pictorial vocabulary. This move identifies the picture plane, and accordingly the compositions, as an arena of continuous rather than hierarchic value, emphasizing the autonomy of the painting relative to its sources and suggesting pictorial self-reference as a stylistic value for self-expression.

 Baderia’s imagery is not is not derived from mathematics or structures from the other arts, of the likes of Vassily Kandinsky and others. Neither are the images derived from the realm of any natural appearances. At this point of his artistic enterprise his style seems to have developed into a non-objective one, achieved by a calm disengagement from both mimetic as well as analytic responses to tangibly recognisable objects, in favour of inventions wherein the visual elements are conceived on models more perceptive and notational than linguistic in nature. His non-objective elements seem to exemplify a realm of psychic-spiritual subjectivity.

Generalisation of pictorial sources is achieved through techniques of abstract imagery, compact compositions and resplendent colours. It is as if he culminates all his intuitive experiences, elaborating them through the primacy of colours. Titles like Kaali of Kamakhya, Whistling Lake, Shrine, Four Elements, Krishna, Awakening, and so many others, are like names given to feelings, experiences and concepts, more with the purpose of making the gamut of his expressions more comprehensible, than any replication or simplification of form.

Where he has excelled this time is in his compositions and use of colours. With the urgency to pour out what occurs to him in the flit of a moment, it is but natural that he would turn to quick drying acrylic as the medium of his choice. Fire, water, season and soul inform his canvasses, products of a fully committed spirit, in the artist’s quest to make himself and his art understood. If he can sustain himself on this table, there is little doubt that Rajesh Baderia is tomorrow’s celebrated artist.

Aruna Bhowmik, art critic HOME