Untitled

Artist: Jiten Sahu
Medium: Acrylic on Canvas
Size: 31 × 56 inches (78.74 × 142.24 cm)
Year: 2022

In this luminous acrylic on canvas, Jiten Sahu presents a stylized village tableau that captures the rhythm and essence of rural life through a language rooted in vibrant color, geometric simplification, and folk-inspired form. The painting exemplifies the artist’s distinctive visual idiom, where the quotidian is elevated to the poetic, and the landscape becomes a stage for memory, labor, and rooted identity.

The composition is anchored in a foreground dominated by a vivid yellow field, textured with nuanced variations of green that suggest cultivated growth and agrarian vitality. This chromatic intensity immediately sets a tone of warmth and fecundity, drawing the viewer into a world that is both intimate and universal. In the middle ground, an ensemble of brightly hued, geometrically constructed houses, rendered with crisp lines and flat, tonal planes, populates the scene. Their angular rooftops, in shades of red, brown, and white, create a rhythmic architecture that recalls the stylized forms of indigenous and folk visual traditions. These built forms are not mere backdrops, but carriers of cultural identity and lived experience.

Slightly off-center, the figure of a woman stands beneath a stylized mango tree, its branches heavy with ripe fruit. The tree’s sculptural silhouette and the repetition of rounded mango forms introduce an organic counterpoint to the angularity of the village architecture. The woman, rendered in bold flat color with a reddish-orange costume and dark flowing hair, is a central, animating presence. Her gesture, gently holding a large green mango, infuses the scene with a sense of immediacy and symbolic fertility. She is both figure and archetype, embodying themes of sustenance, caretaking, and cyclical abundance.

Beyond the houses, the composition recedes into a pale green hill and abstract, softened forms that evoke distant terrain. This backdrop, while minimal, serves to situate the village in a broader landscape without distracting from the central narrative. The simplified perspective and deliberate flattening of spatial depth speak to a tradition of folk and tribal aesthetics, yet Sahu’s refined use of color and spatial arrangement reveals a sophisticated contemporary sensitivity. Jiten Sahu’s work stands as a celebration of vernacular life, resonant with nostalgia, rootedness, and quiet dignity. Through his vivid palette and formal economy, he offers a vision that is at once deeply personal and broadly emblematic of the cultural landscapes of rural India.