Wood, Black, Colour, Scar 

For almost half a century, black has been the colour of the rainbow for artist Jeram Patel. His encounters in the 1960s with thick layers of pasted-together plywood and the blowtorch created visually strong images of scarring and torment, further reinforced by hammered in strips of crumpled metal sheets and nails. The blowtorch flame cut through the layers of plywood along the abstract forms chalked out by the artist on the top sheet, blackening the torn edges with soot leaving them raw and jagged like festering open wounds without the balm of healing. 

His return to canvas and the drawing sheet came with the heavy baggage of non-representational forms of the wood works but there was a major difference. Unlike the open rawness of the images on wood, these forms were closed and mysterious. They also appeared highly animated with loads of suppressed energy and the eerie aftermath of violence. There seemed to be something hidden within them struggling for release or waiting, dormant, for the right moment of deliverance. Even when, as in the case of the drawings, groups of smaller forms appeared, there was a kinetic energy about them that determined a specific movement and a suggestive specificity about their forms. 

By the end of the millennium, Jeram Patel’s paintings and drawings took another turn. The central, formal mass began to slowly come apart. It split to create several smaller forms that seemed to be related to each other. These smaller forms took the shape of muscular and skeletal mass, mangled machine parts, primitive stone tools, even sophisticated machine tools. The starkness of the presentation and the uncompromising blackness, greying at the edges, continued. 

In 2003, Jeram Patel decided to try his hand once more at plywood and the blowtorch, creating a series of the most enigmatic works over a period of a few weeks. He made them in Rajkot, where he stayed with a very helpful family who offered him elaborate and reliable support with good carpenters and technicians, and the unconditional warmth of friendship.  

As in the paintings, the image on these plywood works changed dramatically. It also split into several smaller pieces, held together with an amazing sense of stillness, a centrifugal tension that determined the exact position of each piece and a formality of design honed, no doubt, from the sensibility of an applied artist. Colour returned. Strong, vocal, intense. Bringing with it the slight gloss of enamel paint that heightened the deep and darkly painted, terraced edges of the gouged-out forms.  

And with it, the memories of black. The colours of the Jeram Patel rainbow. 

Sandhya Bordewekar 

Baroda, February 2005