Sajal Sarkar
Birth of Another God, 2026
Oil on canvas
78.5h x 78.75w in.
A desolate landscape, with traces of life in the distance. A strategically placed horizon sharply splits the land and the sky. This familiar trope of Romantic landscape painting, which Sajal Sarkar has mastered over the last decade, prominently appears in his newest series Birth of Another God, albeit with a twist. A massive, bizarre structure in the foreground, built of seemingly tiny fragments, interrupts the horizon. A closer scrutiny finds that many of thefragments are specific objects of various scales, from urban detritus to skeletal remains, while others remain unidentifiable. The cluster seems tentative, threatening to fall apart. Ambiguity, which is central to Sarkar’s formal and conceptual process, characterizes the series; it is thereforenecessary to examine the role of ambiguity in his creative enterprise by touching on broader issues around abstraction.
In retrospect, it is clear that the Western modernist discourse on abstract art was about cherished ideals that were mostly unachievable in practice. In both pre-war Europe and postwar America, images of discarded material reality described by such phrases as ‘non-figurative’, ‘non-objective’, or ‘non-representational’ concealed a fallacy that all intelligent abstract painters knew all along: if ‘figuration’ implies not just human or animal figures but references to anything corporeal, then any notion of ‘pure’ abstraction becomes a myth, since even the most non-figurative gesture on a surface is always capable of invoking a material reference, even if remotely. Malevich’s iconic White on White (1918), the uniquely simplified self-referential image that can also be read as a tilted blank canvas mounted on a white wall, brings the point home; it unequivocally demonstrates that far from being mutually exclusive, pictorial realism and abstraction are always in a symbiosis, the potential of each embedded in the other. Much of the abstraction by the American Minimalists (Frank Stella’s early pin stripes, among others) were informed by the awareness of this underlying paradox in the discourse of abstraction, where iconoclasm is rhetorical, at best.
Another concealed issue is the question of power. The movements in abstract art in both Europe and America were launched by white –mostly heterosexual-- males. The ideals of abstraction, in other words, belonged to a specific demographic, which denied its own subject-position and professed those ideals as universal and themselves simply as ‘artists’. Such endorsement of an iconoclastic, self-referential, ‘non-figurative’ art –often identified by the generic label ‘formalism’-- empowered the universalist identity of those artists.
The utopian claims of modernist abstract art were critically dissected between the 1970s and the 1990s. The critique convincingly established that projection of the artist’s subjectivity with any claim of universal validity is no longer tenable in a heterogeneous world; and that despite its apparent divorce from corporeality or perceivable subject and content, the specific historical location of the image and its maker plays a central role in the process. This revisionist tideopened the doors to a fresh surge of an immense variety of experimental abstraction –often labeled New Abstraction-- around the turn of the century by freeing it from the previous mandates. Spearheaded by artists of color and various sexualities and genders, a largely self-conscious abstract art has emerged over the last couple of decades where incisive political and social subjects playfully mingle with energetic explorations of material and process, demonstrating the artists’ sharp awareness of history. Mark Bradford, Julie Mehretu, Chris Ofili,and Nari Ward are among those who stand out on this front, all of whom exploit abstraction’s apparent detachment from corporeality to encode it with signs from that same reality.
Sajal Sarkar’s training and practice, however, happened far away from this milieu of playful iconoclasm, as he was born, raised, and trained in Kolkata (formerly Calcutta), India. The primary goal of art training at the Kolkata institutions has long been enhancement of technical skill, which breeds a cultish allegiance to figurative representations among its students. And in light of the city’s robust history of left-leaning thinking, figurative art fits neatly into its elite visual culture. While Sarkar, after his graduation, relocated to Baroda in the province of Gujarat, where the art milieu is very different from that in Kolkata, he carried with him hubris for his expertise in figure drawing. Because his creative thinking has always been deeply affected by crises of humanity, his anthropocentric work from his Baroda phase typically featurescompetently depicted human bodies writhing in agony.
Then in 2016, Sarkar immigrated to the United States with his family. He has since been struggling not only to negotiate his relationship with his adopted home (where he witnessed the ugly, xenophobic side of American society that had remained leashed for decades), but also to locate his niche in an unfamiliar art world, having uprooted a reasonably active career in India. It was through these initial years of self-reflection that he found an opportunity to rigorously revisit his entire creative process: his subjects, imagery, materials, and techniques. His work subsequently underwent a radical transformation; while still steadfastly grounded in his humanistic ideals, he began shifting away from his previous fascination for the human body. Logistical constraints on multiple fronts –the absence of adequate studio space, for one— pushed Sarkar toward watercolor and drawing. Unlike the very large canvases of the four artists mentioned above, the scale and treatment of his work from this period make them an intimateexperience, with radical simplification of the realistic imagery from a few years prior.
The series called Perilous Home, exhibited in 2019, I believe, has immediate kinship with thecurrent one. The work from that series falls into two distinct groups: while one offers discernablereferential subjects, the other underscores design and pictorial surface over illusion of space. Mostly horizontally composed, the first group has a bisected picture plane, forming two segments often linked by a motif that controls the entire composition with remarkable precision. That these are abstractions of panoramic landscapes is obvious; the bisection serves as the horizon, subtly curved to suggest the shape of the planet. Yet the tranquility that such a horizon usually brings to a landscape is either harshly invaded by powerful forces, or an impending doom lurks in the background: dark clouds, fiery glows, thick smoke. The surface shows clear mastery of material and process; tonality is radically economized, yet it produces impressively nuancedeffects and controlled accidents. Dried puddles, blotches, blots and stains that are lifeless, even ugly up close show dynamic interactions when perceived in their pictorial entirety.
Distanced farther from references to corporeality, the pictures of the second group demonstratethat the confrontational notions about life, death and suffering in Sarkar’s Baroda phase are reforged into a more introspective existential vision—a spiritually-inclined position, if you will—through a strategic use of abstraction. Geometric shapes and layered tones engage in a complex formal play, colliding, overlapping, bleeding into one another. The circles and webs expand and multiply with lives of their own and with little obligation to anything beyond pictorial demands. In contrast to the apocalyptic mood of the panoramic landscapes, some of these images feel curiously lively and welcoming; their formal treatment has an “allover”-ness (to borrow a Greenbergian term) that makes them stand apart from the others. It is fair to observe that they testify to Sarkar’s undaunted optimism about life amid all the agonies and perils that torment him.
Sajal Sarkar
Imaginary Couple, 2026
Oil on canvas
77.5h x 52w in.
I have no doubt that Birth of Another God confidently builds on the achievements of Perilous Home. Once some of Sarkar’s logistical issues were resolved in the last few years, like access to a studio space, his work became more ambitious in scale, imagery, and execution.
Fairly large canvases in oil in the current series offer the same landscape format as in the first group of Perilous Home, but dexterous use of the medium introduces a sense of gravity thatreplaces the playfulness of the previous work. Instead of controlled accidents, meticulously executed skies in this series show dense layers of clouds, with signs of instability that heightenthe somber –even ominous—mood of the scenes. The ambiguity of drips, stains and blotches thatdraw attention to the land in the watercolors have changed character as well, making way for a hybrid cluster of unknown identity made up of myriad components looming in the foreground. Sarkar’s intense attention to detail underscores a different kind of ambiguity: one is drawn to the unstable fragments of the clustered entity in the foreground, only to discover that while some of them can be recognized as urban debris and skeletal remains, many other pieces do not refer to any specific objects; they exist only as abstract shapes. I prefer to call them ‘things’, as opposed to ‘objects’. These illusionistically rendered shapes of unknown origin, I argue, play a vital role as pictorial agents of ambiguity and abstraction in these images. They might recall some of the dreamscapes by the French Surrealist Yves Tanguy, an empty land with ambiguous, amorphous shapes. But the abundant presence of ‘things’ in Sarkar’s work and their instability make the scenes feel stranger and more precarious than Tanguy’s paintings.
In Imaginary Couple, a massive upright structure --the low horizon contributing to its enormity-- invades the foreground of the vertically composed picture. The behemoth defies description --perhaps it is a tall dead tree or a figure with a raised arm. Yet while the upper portion of the shaft is convincingly painted as a skeletal form with a visible vertebral column within it, strange,malleable, coil-like ‘things’ instead of a head frustrates any attempt to read the entity either as a tree or a body. What is more, the darker, lower section is composed of ‘things’ that are abstract in their own right. But then again, at the foot of it sits a clearly recognizable skeleton of a seemingly docile animal (a dog?). The same ambiguity, produced through judicious use of realism and abstraction, is evident in Birth of Another God, where an equally baffling, intenselyred tornado-like shape ominously rise from a dark, hilly landscape. Instead of a regular whirlpool of wind, however, this dynamic form is composed of countless ‘things’ of various shapes, some of them splintering outward. It is tempting to read them as pieces of architecture and furniture (as objects), but such references turn out to be tentative, at best. A similar encounter awaits in Floating Heart on Alakananda: a heart-shaped structure built with a dense crowd of mostly ‘things’ aggressively dominates the space. With the palpable air of uncertainty, these almost primeval landscapes are evidence of Sarkar’s meditations on the precarity of civilization and his earnest search for order within chaos.