Untitled

Artist: Jiten Sahu
Medium: Acrylic on Canvas
Size: 31 × 56 inches (78.74 × 142.24 cm)
Year: 2023

This vibrant and stylized acrylic painting by Jiten Sahu presents a richly textured and color-saturated view of a village scene, infused with folk sensibility and contemporary abstraction. The composition is thoughtfully arranged to guide the viewer’s eye through layers of human presence, architectural forms, and cultivated land, all rendered in bold colors and simplified shapes.

At the forefront of the painting stands a woman, stylized with clear, defined outlines and flat planes of color. She holds a large, light green fruit in her hands, a gesture that adds both narrative and symbolic depth to the scene. Her clothing, a red blouse paired with a matching wide sarong or skirt—features striking contrasts against a light blue sash at her midriff. Her skin is rendered in a pale tone, while her dark hair is pulled neatly back, offering a calm, centered presence. She is positioned slightly to the right, angled toward the viewer with a composed, graceful stance, grounding the otherwise rhythmically active composition.

The middle ground comes alive with an exuberant cluster of village buildings painted in a medley of warm and cool hues, reds, oranges, yellows, blues, and greens, forming a near-geometric patchwork. These architectural shapes, although simplified, are distinctly individual in color and proportion, creating a dynamic sense of community and spatial density. Below the buildings, the land unfolds in golden yellows and soft greens, suggestive of cultivated fields or a sunlit terrain. This horizontal stretch of landscape provides a visual rest between the denser village and the vertical prominence of a large, stylized tree to the right. The tree is adorned with oval-shaped green fruits and painted in bold, confident strokes that echo the folk-inflected aesthetic of the rest of the painting. Like the woman and the buildings, the tree is rendered in a simplified, almost symbolic manner, its presence more metaphoric than botanical.

Jiten Sahu’s work draws inspiration from the visual traditions of rural India while simultaneously embracing modernist influences. His use of flat, vibrant color fields, bold outlines, and symbolic simplification echoes both folk art and post-impressionist composition. This particular painting captures the artist’s hallmark style: energetic yet meditative, deeply rooted in a sense of place, and animated by texture, pattern, and emotional clarity. It is a celebration of village life through a contemporary and poetic lens.