Lot #14: Oil painting on canvas

Signed and dated at rear.

30" x 30"

Jeet Aulakh is a deeply spiritual painter, all his body of work reflecting that mystery, magnetism and magic usually associated with music. To me, the key to his paintings is to think of them as sounds, recorded on canvas and ready to be played for the tuned-in spiritual receptor. He is creating non-objective, hard edge paintings, very much like Claude Tousignant. They both have that mysterious way of representing sounds, as Claude did with his Gongs, but the difference is that Jeet has a softer edge, a more sensitive approach and a more complex composition. He is deeply rooted in his spiritual heritage, where meditation plays a crucial role and his body of work reflects thata tranquility, an isolation but also a way of communication. The sound of his works is not a sharp, loud one, but a muted, almost murmured whisper. His receptor is the whole universe, and Jeet is able to send his messages and to receive that spiritual richness which enables him to find new ways, new images, and new sounds. The colours are blending into one another in a gradual transition suggesting fluidity, continuity and a sense of equilibrium coming from a very spiritual inner soul. If Bertram Brooker was the first Canadian painter to put sounds on the canvas, as in the Sounds Assembling of 1928, Jeet is continuing the tradition and is enriching it with new meanings of harmony, rhythm and soul-deep introspection.