The journey of Art with Hemraj

If there is darkness,

There’s light

If there’s despair,

Is there something 

Beyond the idea of hope?

A light emits

That peeps 

In small specks

Here and there

Now and then

In the midst of all 

That is shrouded

All that is inaccessible. 

Thus under the dark and opaque applications, Hemraj sprinkles illumination and trails that beckon into something like the “woods are lovely, dark and deep “

With us forever sniffing for more, life with its dynamism, ceases not throwing its typical peek a boo dice, while we keep losing ourself into the illusions. But there’s perhaps always some small holes in those hard rocky structures that reek of the real fluid of life! 

The mammoth rocks in the Monument Valley in Arizona seemed emitting life through such holes. The softest entities of nature, have the power to make way through the toughest! So seem the calling of the minute rosy strokes upon the dark impenetrable backdrop of Hemraj’s canvas.

And then there’s the curious transition! The contemporary artist’s very same work modifies more… Wonder if that is the journey that art takes, as the artist is forever trying to find a foothold over fluid pathways? To my limited perspective the work moves from a simplistic, to a more patterned finish when Hemraj received the intimation to put the work to rest. 

Wonder if it is an instance of the being inside of us, captivated in the endless patterns of life? Or the artist reflecting the patterned labyrinthine clutches?  Where on the verge of receiving the bounty of minimalism, life shuffles the whole pack again and we are back to square one? Back to bring gobbled by the mouth of the longest snake upon that quintessential board of the snakes and the ladders? Back to being stuck with Sisyphus?

Though driving for breakthroughs, is the artist and his art at times a replication of a universal sensibility? 

Written by Bhoomika Jain Art critic and art historian