Jyoti in Reverse: Jyoti Bhatt

Bright, glossy and full of mischief – if one encounters these reverse paintings without knowing who made them, one might guess it was the work of a young painter just starting out! They are in fact made by Jyoti Bhatt, who is 92 years old and among the first generation of artists to graduate from the Faculty of Fine Arts in Baroda.
With Bhatt, things are rarely what they first seem, though it is far from being sly. His work is irreverent and entirely honest. It challenges our ideas of how things ought to be, to think a little freely, to take life lightly and play seriously. For seventy years his sketchbooks have been his laboratory and his playground. He toys with his ideas in them, breaks them apart and pieces them back together. Most of the images for the reverse paintings come from those notebooks, his own prints, paintings and photographs. In that sense he is closer to a jazz musician improvising and re-jigging, than to a painter waiting on inspiration. He keeps going back to old material and making it new. 
As a schoolboy in the 1940s, Bhatt watched a signboard painter in his hometown of Bhavnagar, working on glass and realised “the image was meant to be viewed from the other side.” This was a moment of revelation for the young Jyoti, while at home, two cupboards had glass-painted bouquets on their doors. They were simple, even naïve, but their colours stayed crisp for years. The fascination with the effect of glass had early roots. 
Years later, Jyoti Bhatt remembered the reverse paintings, when in the late 1970s, an exhibition of Mysore glass paintings at the Faculty of Fine Arts, MSU Baroda got the tenacious K. G. Subramanyan experimenting with the technique. At the time Bhatt was engaged in the photographic documentation of the fast-disappearing traditional and folk arts of India. Once analogue photography disappeared almost overnight in the mid-90s, Jyoti Bhatt started returning to painting. In the early 2000s, Bhatt almost took the still unfamiliar medium of reverse painting in earnest. He says,“Working in this medium allowed me to learn from my own technical mistakes. Almost as if I had taken it up as a challenge, I have continued working in this medium ever since.”
In Bhatt’s work, folk and traditional imagery meets the clean lines of Pop Art. In Nostalgia, a cat with a fish in its mouth sits between the lines of a Gujarati nursery rhyme. A note across it says it was made from a drawing by a village woman on her wall, “not after Picasso.” Kundli takes the grid of a horoscope chart and fills it with the signs for the pound, dollar, yen and rupee. In Flight, a haloed bird soars past the word DIGITAL under a line from an old Mohammed Rafi song. The parrot, a symbol of desire and longing, turns up again and again, in Golden Cage, The Wayfarers and Parasol of Paradise. 
His work draws on the glossy popular imagery of this century and the last, and just as much on the deeply symbolic, earthy delights of the art of ordinary people. For Jyoti Bhatt, folk, outsider and pop sit on one continuum. All of it finds space in his work - made by ordinary people, for ordinary people.