Satish Bhaisare's art has as many layers as it does inspirations. The young artist's first solo exhibition currently on at Apparao Galleries showcases a series of works of remarkable maturity and depth, works that draw equally from the style of American abstract expressionist Jackson Pollock, and from the soul of Hindustani classical and Sufi music.
His acrylics on canvas feature layer upon layer of colour — blues, greens and yellows, or violets, aquas and oranges, or all of the above — laid on in incredibly fine vertical streaks of paint. The result is a look that's so delicately textured that you could mistake it, at first glance, for a woven textile or even perhaps 3D art.
“It's hard to say how many layers of paint the average painting has,” says Satish, who comes from a small village in Madhya Pradesh but now resides in New Delhi. “I just keep adding them on until I find satisfaction in the way it looks.”
The seeds of inspiration for these works came when he was a student at the Indore College of Fine Arts — his education funded by an IAS officer who was impressed by his artistic talent (“my family was too poor to support me,” he says) — and first saw a movie on Pollock, an artist as famed for his unique technique of paint pouring back in the 1940s as for his volatile, self-destructive behaviour. “His techniques and his story remained with me for years, while I was experimenting and trying to find my own style,” he says.
The breakthrough came late one night in 2009, when one of his attempts to create his own take on a Pollock-style abstract suddenly came together. “I liked that painting, and I finally started feeling satisfied with what I was doing,” says the 32-year-old artist. The series of paintings currently on display have all evolved out of that night's work, and are all done without Satish putting his brush to the canvas. “I stretch out the canvas either on an easel or on a wall (instead of on the floor, as Pollock did), mix the paint into a paste and apply it onto the canvas with force,” he explains.
They've also all been created as Satish listens to the music he loves, the Hindustani classical vocals of Kumar Gandharva and Mukul Shivputra or the Sufi tunes of Nusrat Fateh Ali. “There's definitely a lot of influence of the music on the works,” he says. “I'd like to believe that looking at the paintings brings as much solace to the soul as listening to the music does, but that's for my audience to say.”
The exhibition is on till August 13.
