To enter Jangarh’s world, you have to play along, peel off reality and believe in the aural world.
Jangarh Singh Shyam’s images are electric and pulsate like energy fields. To enter Jangarh’s world, you have to play along, peel off reality and believe in the aural world. We discovered Jangarh at different times in our lives, but the effect was the same - we were mesmerized by both - his world and his genius. And like all good things, over time, Jangarh has come to mean many things to us.
His paintings have a quiet sense of humour that is easy to miss, the silliness of an expression, the googly eyes of a bird, the lolling tongue of an effeminate lion. He titles his works often specifically, naming peacocks, snakes, trees, airplanes, but the creatures themselves look nothing like what they’re “supposed” to be. A mighty Peepal becomes a thin green sapling balancing dozens of birds. An airplane feels woven from soft rattan. A sunflower grows a tree-like trunk and petals that wave like the limbs of a hydra. He’s teasing us, toying with our sense of what things should look like, and that’s where the joy begins.
There are four paintings of peacocks in this exhibition, and they are all mutually unintelligible. The earliest, from 1984, shows a bright yellow bird with cobalt and ultramarine plumage. The latest resembles a wide-eyed green rooster running towards you, chased by a pink mongoose mid cha-cha. It’s hard to tell where the mongoose’s tongue ends and the peacock’s crest begins.
Jangarh’s paintings move between two modes: the iconic and the narrative. His narrative works are often scenes of animals simply going about their business, and yet they carry a quiet tenderness. Pairs recur everywhere: white tigers hunting together, birds flying side by side, while mythical snakes tango around. This deep valuing of the mate, the companion, is hard to shake. As if, in Jangarh’s world, like in Noah’s Ark, all creatures come in twos.
What unites his work and sets it apart from almost anything that has come before or after is the life force he infuses into it. While the paintings pulsate with the energy inherent in his use of waves of coloured dots over flat applications of paint, in his Rotring pen works he elevates it to a fever pitch, where the deities and animals seem to vibrate and distort with that energy.
Dhwani Gudka and Keshav Mahendru