Jeram Patel: Fire and Void

Zero degree printing

by Dr. Emilia Terracciano

A scorched onion emerges from the soil in the manner of a hot-air-ballon. A little further is a charred, trunkless tree or is it a human stump? Looking at Jeram Patel’s lithograph (Untitled, 1968) is to return to a child-like world at once full of wonder and fear of the unknown – a world in which life takes form from play but also unimaginable violence. This violence of being is what Patel called the ‘dignity of explicit aesthetics’.[2]

Jeram Patel’s contribution to contemporary Indian art is widely recognised and remains unique in terms of its abstraction and graphic explosiveness. In the early sixties at the Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda, Patel was considered by colleagues and peers a taciturn artist. He was bold and brash, ever hostile towards verbalisation, especially when it came to art matters. Art critic Richard Bartholomew invoked the mythical image of the lone wolf to describe his bohemian and aloof persona (a misnomer in many ways – wolves are pack animals who typically live, hunt, and raise their young in cooperative social groups). But it makes sense to see how and why Patel welcomed an anti-intellectual approach; his art sat uneasily within the largely figurative, narrative, and politicised forms of storytelling that came to define the Baroda School of Art painterly canon. When viewing his cryptic work, contemporary critics ascribed magical, votive, and taboo-like properties to his shapes, forms, and colours. Primeval organisms, oneiric inscriptions, archetypical forms, and emblematic structures – things that bear little or no reference to the outside world – could be found in Patel’s non-figurative creations.[3] Gulam Mohammed Sheikh put it well: Jeram’s drawings inspired ‘memories of foetal darkness, the history in the womb. There the drama of primeval ritual of the foetus forming and deforming itself in a variety of expansions and contractions is reenacted. In this ritual curious flora and fauna participate: flower and frog, bee and rhinoceros, snakes and plants, man and dinosaur, woman and lizard play a game of interchanging limbs.’[4]

After an initial training in painting at the J. J. School in Mumbai, Patel studied typography and publicity design from 1957-59 at the Central School of Arts and Crafts in London. In the sixties he taught visual design at the newly opened National Institute of Design and at the School of Architecture in Ahmedabad. He later worked as a graphic designer and textile advisor whilst teaching in the Department of Applied Arts of the Fine Arts Faculty at Baroda. In 1963 he co-founded the collective Group 1890 which included artists J. Swaminathan, Ambadas, and Himmat Shah. It was around this time in Baroda that Patel started mixing enamel paint, zinc white, sand, and fevicol – a synthetic resin adhesive designed for heavy-duty woodworking – as well as other materials to create dense, grainy and pasty layers of bright colours which he evenly applied to the canvas.[5] Nails, bits of metal and wood were inserted into the canvas surface to compose landscapes that appear removed both in time and space. After 1962, Patel attached metal parts to a laminated plywood – typically six inches deep – and engaged the extreme heat of the blowtorch to blast shapes and forms directly onto the plastic surface. The left-out spaces around the charred hollows are porous and freckled and can be likened to the quality of the human (or animal) skin – ‘ringworm on skin’ wrote one critic, open sores wrote another. Shapes and contortions suggest an organic dynamism: the cycle of birth, decay, and death. In this context, these combustion assemblages become tactile as much as visual, generating a sense of discomfort for the viewer. They recall the sculptures created a few decades earlier by Alberto Burri – the Italian artist who served as army frontier doctor during WWII. And yet the more historically proximate example would be the auto-destructive sculptures blowtorched by Gustav Metzger – literally holes in a sheet – from the late fifties in Europe.

Patel transitioned to the writerly medium of paper shortly after his use of fire as sculpting tool. Drawing free-hand, etching, and lithography became his favoured processes. Fire was replaced by acid when biting lines into a metal surface to create an intaglio (etching) but also oil when drawing on a flat stone or metal plate (lithography). Both etching and lithography require a shift in thinking from positive to negative spaces for the final etched grooves or recessed channels form the actual lines of the design. This was a time when artists routinely spent time in the printing room at Baroda ‘trying out stuff’. Patel’s creations from this period – all in black-and-white – display a greater sense of care and control in the way surface and structure have been meticulously prepared, handled, and organised. One observes a stronger concern for design animated by a search for a rationality that is deeper than one of easy rules of style: figures usually occupy the central space of the page and are suggestive of shadows…torsos…dormant beasts that upon waking up find themselves trussed.

By the end of the sixties, his preference for paper as printing surface is established. Surface could mean many things: an empty cigarette packet, a matchbox, a sweet wrapper, a colleague’s leftover scraps. Patel’s voracious and magpie approach to materials, grabbing and working on whatever was available, on what was found rather than actively chosen, may explain his singular use of mylar (in this selection) inscribed ‘Dhruva Mistry’. Mylar is a more expensive, durable, flexible and transparent polyester film made from stretched polyethylene terephthalate. Much more could be written about Patel’s way of working but what is useful to note is that his colleague – the sculptor Mistry – had also taken on the ‘problem’ of realising forms of the visible world through a process of restraint, of making by withdrawing. The action of removing (not adding) to the built surface remained a central tenet for Mistry and Patel. Both found in drawing a principle and way of thinking through formal puzzles – hatchings and smudges describe bodies and limbs but also single out directional lines around the forms. With Patel, although the various forms appear balanced and solid, lines bring ‘awareness to the paper, giving concrete evidence of that ‘positive’ material base.’[6]

Patel was not alone in his devotion to paper as principal medium. It was around 1971 that he formed a singular association with artist and drawing tutor – Nasreen Mohamedi – who had also studied in London. When viewing their monochrome creations together it is difficult not to think of Mohamedi’s mantra: ‘The maximum of the minimum’. Stark, precise, and economical in delineation, both artists operated through a process of elimination – a degree zero of writing. And yet one can observe differences: Mohamedi diluted her ink ad infinitum to draw continuous and spacious structures evocative of natural phenomena: a shimmering spiderweb, a cloud, a blade of grass. Patel worked otherwise; his dense and thick shapes convey an intensity that is rendered by gathering ink around a point. The resulting bold silhouettes reveal a tension in the way they are ‘drawn out with a dry brush or in the hatches of a nib to suggest hair, fur or bristle.’[7] These latter forms are arranged against the white paper like transformed characters of typography, assertive but not located in volumetric shape. Emptiness – or the negative space of the page – shapes the structure and overall design of letterforms. Mohamedi called this absence – Sunyata. Patel was more down-to-earth. In his words: ‘While I make these things I have no questions to ask, and I am not bothered about the questions or the answers. Because I have already participated in the action which is the attack. Therefore, I never question a particular production. The thing made is an entirely new thing. After making a painting I, of course, see the painting, but I see it only as a natural object, as I see a landscape or a tree or a stone.’[8]