Santanu Hazarika, like all artists, is a dreamer. One of his dreams came true when he turned the sleek black body of a Porsche Panamera into a canvas at Mumbai’s ‘All You Can Street Festival’ recently. The luxury car was the tabula rasa of the 38-year-old artist to doodle abstract white lines live for three days. The Panamera, with Hazarika’s embellishments looking in sync with the thrill of driving it, was the centrepiece around which concerts, fashion shows, panel discussions and other activities were organised at the festival.
“Drawing upon a car was a childhood dream. My first such sketches were on a Maruti 800 I owned in 2012. Since then, I have painted on many other cars and even on a bus, but I wanted to do something different this time. Since I had always sketched with black ink on white cars, I decided to do the reverse,” says Hazarika, one of the exponents of Z-ennial subculture in Indian art. His canvases extend to sneakers, skateboards, album covers and apparel; he has also created NFTs of his art.
Hazarika broke into the mainstream art scene in India earlier this year with his debut solo exhibition BLCK at Mumbai’s Art&Soul gallery. Having explored different media and art avenues, it seemed natural for him to move into the exhibition space. “I am a regular at galleries and find the idea of a show intriguing—it is an accumulation of months or years of artistic expression presented in a structured way. I had worked on a series of 30 monochromatic paintings for a year, which I thought would make a good starting point for an exhibition. I wished to see how the high art ecosystem works, and present my work to a new audience and get their perspectives,” Hazarika says, happy that the audience embraced his style, even though it was different from mainstream artistic oeuvres.
A quick scroll through the Mumbai-based artist’s Instagram account reveals a unique style that draws heavily from comic book art. His doodles flow endlessly along patterns and rippling lines; often without a focal point. Hazarika adds a visibly dystopian edge to each drawing—tentacled arms, melting faces and bulging eyeballs. He has transformed Pikachu—the cutest Pokemon ever—into a devious yellow-coloured menace with just a couple of strokes of his pen.
“I started by doodling on my desk, computer, a friend’s guitar; just about any surface,” he recalls adding, “My style is highly detailed for which I experiment with different art materials and equipment. I often speculate on which can be the most intriguing medium I can use. For example, one day, sitting in my studio, I noticed that my printer was white in colour. I didn’t like it and I started drawing on it. Then I moved from the printer to the desk and all the stuff on it,” he says. Hazarika’s practice is largely defined by the dual palette that dominated his solo show. It is also evident in the preponderance of the grayscale on his Instagram grid, but he has used vibrant colours in his album art for musicians Ritviz and Nucleya.
“I have phases where I’m into different colours, but I always return to black and white because that’s how I learned to draw. I don’t have formal training in art and taught myself drawing by looking at comic books,” he says, adding, “They used a lot of black on white, which is what I’m comfortable with. I’ve experimented with many colours and I know how to use vibrant hues, but my true form is black and white,” he says, naming Canadian artist Todd McFarlane, Korean cartoonist Kim Jung gi, and American artist Jack Kirby among his favourite comic book artists.
The early seeds of Hazarika’s artistic career were sown in his 20s at gatherings with his musician friends back home in Guwahati. Because he couldn’t sing, he would draw. “I had many musician friends, but I couldn’t sing. So I would take their amps, guitars, and megaphones, and customise them with my drawings,” says the artist, who was studying to become an engineer at the time.
His repertoire over two decades includes landscapes, portraits as well as abstract art. Ask him what his most challenging project has been so far, and he says, “I’ve never found any work difficult—making art is as effortless as talking for me. If you give me a brief, I’ll
do it.” What he does find challenging though is coping with his bouts of impostor syndrome and self-doubt. “Since art comes naturally to me, I wonder why I’m not struggling more. Maybe I’m not good enough, or maybe I’m not working hard… but I am working hard. I’ve slogged for so many years to develop my signature style and visual language, and that thought eventually pulls me out of this funk,” he says.
There are also delightful departures from his usual themes such as a typeface series resembling genitals (art using letters) and political cartoons. But the work closest to his heart continues to remain his winning entry for the Red Bull Doodle Art championship in 2014, during his engineering days. He had doodled on a model of the Taj Mahal, the arches of which were adorned by Hazarika’s squiggles. At
the centre of the model sat a person, cross-legged in meditation, with lush flora and fauna emanating from their mind. He beat over 32,000 participants internationally to bag the prize.
As for the future, he has several projects in the pipeline, including collaborations with brands such as Royal Enfield and Dewars. He is also working on a global campaign for the upcoming Red Bull Doodle Art World Championship, and “also a fun little project with the amazing (singer-songwriter) Sid Sriram”. Doodling to yodelling?
Wait and watch.