<b>The romance with art continues...</b>

The majestic horse gallops across the art works. Dipped in gold, it reaches to the sky as its rider pulls the reins and on another canvas the soaring equine structure is almost saluted by birds that coo in harmony. The artist moulds the horse in bronze and adorns it with admirable sheen, dressing it with burnt gold bridles and pale green patina. “It is a symbol of power. There is a release of energy involved,” observes Satish Gujral, as he introduces the horse, a mighty protagonist of the artist’s latest exhibition—fittingly called Metamorphosis that opens today at Lalit Kala Akademi in New Delhi.

Gujral’s solo after a period of five years is typical of the veteran artist: unpredictable and compelling. The artist plays effortlessly with empty spaces on his canvases. For him, they equal the deafness he acquired due to an accident. “The space is a depiction of the silence that I have experienced since a mishap that rendered me deaf when I was a child. The world can hear me but I know nothing about the sounds that surround me,” he says. The same silence has been an integral part of his art. In 2003, Gujral had painted it in bright hues in the Back to Silence series where abstract patterns merged with figurative. “It is a world that I have created for myself,” chuckles the 82-year-old.

Gujral my have been pushed into silence by fate, but it was his choice to return to it after he realised that the cacophony of worldly sounds—which he could hear after a cochlear implant—did not suit his sensibilities. He got the implant removed a couple of years ago. “I did not like what I heard and decided to go back to my own world,” he smiles, sipping coffee at his red-brick home in Delhi, as wife Kiran looks on. A trained artist, she decided to become, what Gujral terms, his “best critic”, instead of painting her own works. She became an interface between him and the world outside and a supporter in the unconventional path he paved for himself as an artist.

For instance, while others in the art fraternity were reluctant to experiment, Gujral dabbled in varied mediums—paper collage, ceramics and even burnt wood sculptures, which he took to after observing the colourful embers yielded by wood fire. “I always wanted to try new things. Many artists prefer to play safe by following a style already accepted by the market but I look for constant reinvention,” says the artist, who has even won international laurels as an architect. He built a palace for the Saudi royal family during the reign of the late King Faisal. He even designed the domed, red-brick Belgian embassy in Delhi. It won him the honour of being the only non-Belgian architect to be bestowed with the Belgian government’s Order of the Crown award. Gujral calls his tryst with architecture ‘accidental’. “A friend casually asked me if I could design buildings and I immediately thought, ‘Why not!’,” he recalls.

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