ART of Ajit Seal: His Embodied Worlds – Upal Deb

“I believe that art is a creative bridge between our imaginative vision and our inhabited experiences, both of which reconcile to recreate the primal human condition, and crystallize our current artistic sensibility responding to the existential dualities and paradoxes each one of us lives in some point of our life”-Ajit Seal


Ajit Seal is a quintessential visual artist. A painter, graphic artist with lithography being his forte. Now sixty-one, his artistic prime passed in Assam where he was born and grew into the artist that he is today. He evinced his intense interest in the visual art through encounters with the oeuvre of the masters of European and Indian art. The milieu and the personal curiosity harmonized in his formative years and worked as bubbles to stretch into his consciousness as days went by. He recounts his childhood love for craftsmanship citing his admiration for a carpenter’s dexterity in carving and chiseling wood. Ajit had his formal academic training in Fine Arts first from the Guwahati College of Art and Craft and then in Garhi Studio, New Delhi, where under the stewardship of the leading artist and art teacher Bhabesh Sanyal, he completed a two-year training in Graphics. Sanyal who played an important role in the making of such artists as Satish Gujral and Kishen Khanna, trained him about the intricate nuances of graphic arts.

Significantly, Ajit found graphics to be his métier till date. Ajit subsequently was awarded a Post Diploma in Graphics from Kala Bhavana, Vishva Bharati, Santiniketan, where he teaches now. At the instance of the artist Shobha Brahma, the Graphics Department was established at Gauhati Government College of Arts and Crafts and Ajit joined the faculty of the College. All these stints and concomitant influences inspired the dynamics of his art, animated his vision and opened up new possibilities for his art to grow and diversify towards a distinctive idiom.


Art today is a new kind of instrument, an instrument for . . . organising new modes of sensibility. And the means for practicing art have been radically extended. Indeed, in response to this new function (more felt than clearly articulated), artists have had to become self- conscious aestheticians: continually challenging their means, materials, and methods. – Susan Sontag, “One Culture and the New Sensibility”

The leitmotif predominating Ajit Seal’s artistic spaces is the absorbing world drawn from mythology. He as often as not redraws it, inflects it to dimensions of interplay between gods of a cosmic order and a pantheon of god-like figures close to human demeanour. He eschews romantic motifs but explores profound existential questions, probing engagement of reciprocity between two irresistible orders -the divine and the human.

Ajit holds mastery over layering both light and dark so as to create highly intense luminosity, creating arcane imagery that in his highly evolved painterly canvas draws the technique and the medium together, building divergent moods of representation, an anomalously strange world of queer animals, grotesque humans and imagined pantheon of gods. In the interplay of orders of light and dark, human and divine, there’s often a streak of the chimerical when it comes to the viewer’s reception of the disparate colours and the creed shaping the finished artworks. That the imagery is churned out of mazes of the subconscious, out of a vision of the ideal of an idyllic world the artist imagines speaks of the manifold realms of consciousness that go into the making of each artwork we receive. The controlled lines and the poise in drawings blend together the form and content in Ajit’s work. In other words, his canvas almost always is interspersed with moods of serenity and ludic playfulness. With a conscious use of colour, the images convey the architectonic virtue in their structuring.


“Live in your inner self alone within your soul a world has grown, the magic of veiled thoughts that might be blinded by the outer light, drowned in the noise of day, unheard… take in their song”, said Fyodor Tyutchev in his Silentium. Ajit seems to straddle his interior world which does not impede any outer light whatsoever and the objective life he continually recreates through lens of core of his
selves. Art fundamentally tries to bridge one world with the other, abyss with plenitude, stark realities with mythos by means of a dialogue originating in the mythogenic structures of the artist, infused in the artistic medium, and then transmitted as a harmonic resonance and received as a maieutic echo by the viewer-audience. Ajit’s temper of transmuting the mythogenes into the medium and transmitting it to a receptive soul bridges the ontological, creative state of the artist and his objective human and metaphysical surroundings.