About Saroj Malick
Hailed from a village in Bengal, Saroj grew up in the midst of nature. The Orgram forest beside his village Shilakot used to be his place where the unbridled imagination of the little boy could spread its wings. As he grew up he moved to his prsent hometown Burdwan for higher study. Though the city life helped him prosper in academics that resulted in pursuing his profession as a teacher, the mind was pining for something else, his true vocation. The life found renewed joy as he started travelling to different places with his friends. The boy who used to mesmerise his friends taking photograph of places and people with his handheld Kodak, gradually got infatuated with the art itself. The simple joy turned into a passion play as he continued looking at nature through the eye of a camera. Nature appeared metanatural, sometimes supernatural in Malick’s aesthetic vision. His primary interest in landscape photography gradually turned into abstraction as socio-political consciousness began to affect his vision.
Malick harbours the philosophical and existential perspective that nothing in the world completely dies, they just change form or the trace remains in some form or other. Many ideas fade, words dissipate, colours vanish before they are etched out; people die or for that matter foetuses too, sometimes, do not come out – but where do they go? Malick believes that each of them dissolves into something new, whether ethereal or physical. The universe speaks through them. Malick roams about in a quest to communicate with that. His photography is a conscious attempt to capture the collective unconscious, the dark recesses of human mind in an abstract expresssionist style. The natural and sometimes the mundane, trivial objects get metamorphosed into an idea, a thought, a vision that engages the viewers in a dialectic of thought. His photographs are the languages of the earth and the world we live in.