By Sagar’s Art Stream
In the ever-expanding landscape of Indian contemporary art, few artists have disrupted the visual vocabulary quite like Dr. Bharath S. Rajpal. His was not the path of convention, nor even gentle rebellion — it was the fearless dismantling of structure, the conscious distortion of form, and the re-architecting of how abstraction could live on canvas. In his lifetime, he wasn’t just an artist — he was an idea in constant motion.
A visual thinker, abstract artist, philosopher, and a self-styled glitch in the traditional system, Rajpal’s life and legacy serve as a masterclass in courageous creativity. While he is no longer with us, his paintings, writings, and radical approach to form continue to stir, provoke, and inspire.
The Early Spark: From Communication to Conceptual Chaos
Bharath Rajpal’s story begins in Bengaluru, a city that would both ground and later frame the backdrop of his experimental life. His fascination with geometry, psychology, and visual language began to crystallize in the late 1990s.
In 1999, he enrolled at Srishti School of Art, Design & Technology for a year — a pivotal step in fine-tuning his artistic instincts. It was here that his foundational questions about distortion, abstraction, and visual logic began to take shape.
Following this, Bharath pursued a three-year specialization in Advertising and Graphic Design at Wigan and Leigh College, affiliated with the UK. It was here that his powers of visualization and imagination evolved exponentially, setting the stage for the radical work that would follow.
A lifelong autodidact and impromptu writer, Bharath undertook a 13-year independent research project that sought to fuse mathematics and science with art. This extensive body of thought and experimentation earned him a PhD in Visual Arts from the United States — a recognition of both his intellectual rigor and his fearless innovation.
Glitching the Masters: A New Movement Is Born
Rajpal’s work cannot be classified by any one school or movement. It draws from Cubism but refuses to be defined by it. In his own words, “Cubism was just the beginning. I wanted to go beyond it, question it, even glitch it.”
Thus emerged his signature visual language — a bold and disorienting mix of:
Fragmented perspective
Architectural distortions
Curvilinear abstraction
Sinusoidal and parabolic geometries
Psycho-visual deconstruction
This wasn’t just painting. It was philosophical geometry. A visual rebellion. He called it “Glitch Abstraction”, a term he coined to describe his distortion-heavy works that questioned the sanctity of form and space.
His method included manipulating reflections through convex mirrors, studying pinhole distortions, and reintroducing multi-point perspective in ways that hadn’t been seen since the Renaissance — yet rendered with 21st-century defiance.
Painting as a Philosophical Inquiry
One of Bharath’s greatest strengths was his refusal to romanticize the process of painting. For him, painting was not about emotion in color — it was about intellect in form. He saw the act of painting as a form of cognitive architecture — building space that questioned space itself.
Each canvas asked a question:
What is real? What is remembered? What happens when perspective collapses?
His works — such as Inverted Lanes of the Mind, Non-Parallel Universes, and Echoes of the Self — became not just visuals but experiences. You didn’t just look at his work; you wrestled with it.
The Influence of the Masters, and the Leap Beyond
Bharath’s influences were varied, from Picasso and Braque to M.C. Escher and Indian geometric abstractionists. But his greatest icon may have been Picasso — not for emulation, but for confrontation.
“I admire Picasso’s audacity,” he once said.
“But he eliminated perspective. I wanted to bring it back — with madness.”
This single idea powered much of his career. He saw abstraction as incomplete — fragmented but flat. He wanted to rebuild it using complex geometry, giving abstraction volume, movement, and mental architecture.
Career, Exhibitions, and Wider Recognition
Rajpal’s work began to reach broader audiences in the 2010s through curated exhibitions, critical appreciation, and collaborations. Some key highlights:
Solo and group exhibitions across Bengaluru, Delhi, Goa, and Jaipur
Featured in the docu-series Geniuses of Bangalore
Guest lectures and workshops on Art as Thought Architecture
Honorary Doctorate in Visual Arts conferred by Global Peace University
He was a featured speaker at forums exploring Art and Consciousness, Distortion in Modern Thought, and the psychology of abstraction in the post-digital age.
Though international exhibitions were on the horizon — with curatorial interest from the UAE, Italy, and Russia — Bharath remained, at heart, a Bengaluru boy with paint-stained hands and a cluttered studio.
An Artist of Words as Much as Images
Alongside his practice, Bharath was also a deeply respected writer, illustrator, and copywriter, having worked with several advertising and creative agencies. His background in communication gave him a unique edge — he wrote about art with the same clarity and playfulness that he painted with.
His social media feed — especially on Instagram — was a hybrid of studio updates, philosophical questions, and caption poetry. Lines like:
“Distortion is not error. It’s evolution.”
“Perspective is the most dangerous drug in art.”
“Glitching Picasso since 2009.”
These weren’t just captions. They were provocations.
What the Mind Glitches, the Soul Understands
What makes Rajpal’s work so unforgettable is the emotional undercurrent running beneath its intellectual veneer. Behind the layers of geometry and mirror logic was always a question about memory, identity, and perception.
He once said:
“I don’t paint from feeling. I paint from thought. But feelings find their way back in, eventually — through the distortion.”
Even his most angular paintings had moments of tenderness — soft color gradations, subtle imperfections, gentle chaos. They are works that embrace contradiction, hold tension, and reward prolonged looking.
A Sudden Goodbye, A Lasting Glitch
Bharath Rajpal’s untimely passing was a shock to many. He had just begun to organize a new series, experimenting with spatial sound and 3D-printed form distortions. He had drafts of essays on post-modern distortion. He had just begun.
Artists across India and abroad paid tribute — not just to his work, but to the way he thought, taught, and lived. One wrote:
“He gave us permission to bend the grid. To paint what felt wrong. To think harder.”
A Legacy That Continues to Fracture Norms
Today, his art lives on — not only in homes and collections, but in minds. Several young artists continue to cite him as the person who opened the door to abstraction they hadn’t known how to approach.
Plans are underway for a posthumous retrospective, a publication of his writings, and an archival website that will feature his lectures, digital sketches, and notebooks filled with half-finished ideas — ideas that still glitch and glow.
Final Thoughts: Not an Ending, But a Bending
Dr. Bharath Rajpal’s life was never about painting perfectly. It was about bending form until it revealed something deeper, stranger, and more honest. His canvases didn’t conform — they convulsed. His lines didn’t meet — they challenged one another.
And in doing so, he didn’t just create a body of work.
He created a new grammar of rebellion — one that artists will keep learning from, glitching through, and building upon for years to come.
Rest in abstraction, Dr. Bharath.
You were always more than visible.
You were vision itself — wild, fractured, and free.
