Envisioning the invisible -Hem Raj

Envisioning the invisible

Sometimes the kingdom of art would seem to have shrunk like the Vatican state, thanks to the culture of quantity of finer methods of mapping or dealing with the world of forms and substances. Serious art and actuality appearing to have almost parted company as far as the outer world were concerned. Artist will now set out to dredge independent existences, conceived in the inner recesses of their being and pray why? For despite the rigorous new world of weights and measures and the concomitant computation, the man within the man – the experience – remains as tantalizing a mystery as every, and as such sought after.

Still, only a few artists really dive deep within to bring us some tokens of vibrations from the mainly unsounded depths – trying to incarnate them in lines of light. In this order of work an artist may have little use for what the outer says has to give. No birds or beasts, nothing but incandescent vibrations as if an anima were trembling, like a filament within the bulb of consciousness. How else is one to interpret the emotive meaning of these forays? Over here we start from the centre, at the very heart of the circle, from whence the whole play drives its source and the reasons for being. Yes, the claimed anima possesses a light all its own, the light that the inner vision knows, and expresses, in the cosmos of inebriate colours. This particular light is not a reflection of light from outside. It comes of the heart of the attuned hearts.

Hem Raj’s prime artistic phase is, verily, an objectification of some such inner phenomenon. It is not a work of the mind alone; it is non-referential and at a double remove. The artist merely hints, carrying out, as he is the promptings of his secret spirit. As if surrendered to beauty, and in deep absorption, he seems to have severed from the fixed, and fought over doctrines of the art world. Yes his latest in line mysterious seeming gestalts and forms could not have matured but for some felt inner resonance. Imaging the formless, they surpass the artist’s private fortunes. Works of this order are works of imaginative vision, not of the other passions.

The painter in line with the artistically clairvoyant godfathers of the human race re-enacts a deeper painterly concentration. He pays homage to the principle informing a by now buried inheritance. He is one among chosen of its honest votaries, with little use for fashions in current art forms. It is prayer that he stays this way till the last.

KESHAV MALIK

New Delhi