Sujata exudes strength. More. She exudes light.

She has blossomed at her own rhythm, slowly, obstinately. She has been liberated. And here she is, radiant, transformed by her young maturity.

I have known her for only a short while, may be four or five years when she was showing at the Grand Palais, in Decouvertes, this unseasonal spring of the FIAC on which you found young artists and young hopefuls.

Later, from one exhibition to the next, I witnessed her continued metamorphosis; I saw how a revelation unfolded itself within her and within the depths of her painting. This is a territory where desire can lose its way in the multitude of what Borges calls The Paths which Bifurcate. For the freedom of the artist is unlike the freedom of anyone else. As Henry James said : You need to work and, at the end of work, you need madness. Today, one dare not call this inspiration. But what do you call it then? What happens when Rilke, this prince of poets, remains speechless for ten years, troubled because he cannot summon the words, the spark in him yet to be kindled, and then suddenly one day, from heaven knows where, the first lines of Duino's elegies visit him? Who, among the hierarchy of angles, would hear me if I cried? / and what if one of them were suddenly/to take me to heart: I would succumb, die before a stronger existence! for the beautiful is nothing/ but the first step into the terrible.

When Sujata was still a child, poetry flowed from her lips spontaneously, like a blessing. Her mother who attempted to give this miracle a shape, would transcribe a line or two. And then, as little Sujata began to draw at the age of five or six, poetry vanished. It departed as it had come.
I believe it resurfaced much later, in these last years, in slow, open papers on which colours sing and energy
dominates, making the very air quiver.

Sujata Bajaj arrived in Paris in 1988. The painter Raza who means a great deal to her, had advised her to come to Europe. In India, she had been working on a thesis on tribal art, living in what she called an extraordinary milieu.

At the Beaux Arts in Paris. the milieu was, to be sure, less extraordinary. But her meeting with Claude Viseux was decisive. He is a professor. He uses the monotype. His manner of working fascinated Sujata Bajaj. What did it involve? It involved inking a metal plate, working on the black, placing a leaf underneath and setting the press in motion. The metal plate could be substituted by a glass one. Degas greatly admired these quaint little techniques which in fact could be used for making no more than one print.

To Sujata Bajaj Claude Viseux declared: With the monotype you will be able to find our own Language. His words were prophetic. In the beginning Sujata dazzled herself with profuse orchestrations and unusual elements. She overnourished her plates and paper. It was the excess of a debutante but, all in all, a necessary excess; it bespoke a generous nature which was astonished by the happy accidents emerging from the press. These she would later control.

Currently she is working inside the paper paste over which she sticks papier de soie, traces the surface with chalk, changes her technique incessantly, burns the edges of certain papers and harnesses a variety of scripts. However, there is one signature that is stamped on all her recent works: OM. OM, a primordial cry, the original word, OM energy. This signature, these letters, are organized in every conceivable way, in equilibrium; they dance at the opposite extremities of her composition, they breathe vitality. Around them, stars and planets are born and die. Forms. A painting that is a becoming. Open-ended.

 

Michel Nuridsany
Art Critic, Le Figaro, Paris.

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