Boundless

December 2022, Chithrakala Parishad, Bangalore

Boundless like the expansive blues of the salty sea. Boundless like the immeasurable brown of the earth. Boundless like the uncertainty in space; like the chaos we embrace and boundless like the inexhaustible air we breathe.

As the artist’s daughter, and as the nurtured artist and critic, I watched with renewed enthusiasm every time a painting reached fruition with a swish of a signature at an inconspicuous corner of the canvas blending in his satisfaction and exhaustion precariously with various elements of his compositions.

Jayaram has been creating artfor nearly four decades and I have had the privilege of watching his style, approach and zest for the craft evolve into realms of absolute magic. Formal training in art seems to have embedded itself so deep in rote and muscle memory that it has made way for intentful and uninhibited experimentation in exploring every tone and dent found in pigments, compositions and his inspirations. Each art piece appears to have an element of chaotic calm, a fire that shakes the viewer, beckoning their time, easing them in and leaving remnants of peace in them. I can attest to the process of his art creation being especially and unusually focused to a fault, hours of the night reserved for quiet introspection for their eventual interpretation on canvas, sometimes painstaking to watch as small details are fussed over, given time to set in as an idea, worked and reworked on until it personally speaks to him.

This series that almost tore out into our lives in the last few years has been consciously evolving into creating new beauty standards in the world of landscape art. As with his works, I find intense abstraction in his methods too.

As one peruses through his mostly untitled paintings, they will find acute abstraction of the land and water that surrounds us, makes us, and eventually swallows us. Jayaramcomposeshis canvases with uninhibited freedom letting the elements interact within themselves in the pictorial plane, creating balances, imbalances, breathing spaces and a burgeoning of possibilities for viewer involvement and interpretation.

Through his abstract paintings, Jayaram intends to present the fleeting dispositions of a world which has its blemishes and yetflourishes in the deep teal of the ocean, the azure blues of the skies and the green-browns of the earth to restore hope in our existence despite human interference.

My father presents a world which reflects our inner world landscapes in a language of the formless from his lived experiences and observations.

His art like him is unlimited, immense and immeasurable. Always Boundless.

Parvathi Bhat Giliyal